Katie Ortman Doble is the fun aunt. She is also a friend hoarder, advocate, author, and speaker. In 2013, she was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, which left her blind in her left eye. The following year, doctors discovered it had spread to her liver (and gave her 16 months to live) and in 2018, her brain. Faced with an incurable cancer, Katie found her priorities in life shifting.
In addition to being a stage IV cancer survivor, Katie is an STD survivor and an advocate for comprehensive sex education and discussions about end of life wishes. She shares her journey to finding health and happiness so that others may learn from her experiences.
In 2017, Katie was given the Courage Award from the Melanoma Research Foundation. In 2018, a five-part series on living wills written by Katie was featured on the Denver Hospice blog and picked up by Denver’s local Fox affiliate. In 2019, Katie testified at the State Capitol of Colorado as a proponent for a bill to require comprehensive sex education—which passed. In 2021, she was the recipient of the First Descents‘ Out Living It Award.
Katie credits a mix of integrative healing, positive attitude, and Western medicine for allowing her to survive cancer. She looks for the silver linings—or what she calls #CancerPerks—in everything cancer has thrown her way, which includes four clinical trials, two liver embolizations, gamma knife when it spread to her brain, a liver resection procedure, and numerous trips to New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering and Columbia University, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and UCHealth in Denver. A surgery in September of 2021 to remove half of her liver and all remaining cancer rendered her NED (no evidence of disease).
Katie has been published or featured in NPR, Hidden Brain, HuffPost, Business Insider, Daily Express, New York Post, The Denver Post, Omaha World Herald, Fox31 Denver, and WTAE/ABC-Pittsburgh. You can find additional articles here. Since 2017, Katie has been sharing her story all over the country to organizations like Melanoma Research Foundation, First Descents, Foundation Medicine, the FDA, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus | Center for Interprofessional Practice & Education, Colorado Health Literacy Coalition, Colorado Cancer Coalition, UCHealth Marcom Team, AIM at Melanoma, MarcusEvans, Patients as Partners, Abbvie, and Creative Mornings.
Katie is a graduate of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and a native of Omaha, Nebraska. She lives in Denver with her husband, Nick, whom she met after first connecting on LinkedIn (story here), and their dog Alice. Katie and Alice have matching heterochromatic eyes. The Doble family loves to hike, bike, cook, travel, binge shows, and spend time with their nephews and nieces.
To inquire about speaking opportunities, contact Katie here.
Katie possesses a unique ability to inspire an audience. She shares her personal journey with humor, humility and realism. This approach allows audience members to internalize her key messages and think about how they can personally contribute to advancing cancer care.
~Jennifer Mills, PhD, MSW, MPH, Vice President Patient and Professional Partnerships, Foundation Medicine
Pictured: Katie and her family in October 2021