Kimberley Miller

Kimberley has been a high school English teacher at South Salem High School for the past 20 years.  She is an Oregon native, but she lived in Southern California for five years while a teen.  It was there that she met her husband Steve Miller who she fondly calls "The Fisherman."  Kim was a bit of a wild teen and ran away from home at age 16 to marry her high school sweetheart Steve; they have defied all odds (they are soulmates) and their 40th anniversary will be next year.  


In 1981 they moved back to Kim's native city of Salem, Oregon, and a year later their daughter Kristen was born followed by son Ryan in 1985.  Both children have been a delight - growing up with a deep appreciation of family and nature.  Kristen is a graduate of the University of Oregon and after 9 years of living abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer and later working for the US State Department, she currently resides in Portland, Oregon working as an executive assistant to the CEO of an international corporation.  Ryan is a graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara, and is a senior power train engineer with Hyundai Motor Corps conducting research and development on their electric vehicles.  Happily, in 2015 Ryan married his sweetheart Lisa Franklin and last November they made Kim and Steve  grandparents when Ava Nawa Miller was born.


This past spring Kim was experiencing a variety of menopausal type symptoms: hot flashes, mood swings, fatigue, etc. and then in June realized that a lump she had assumed was a cyst had grown quite large.  After a mammogram, ultra sound, and biopsies, Kim has been diagnosed with Stage 3 invasive ductal carcinoma that has metastasized into the lymph nodes.  After testing it was  determined that the cancer is ER, PR, and HER2 positive - so very aggressive.  At this time she is waiting for PET scan results to determine if the cancer has spread further than the lymph nodes.  She begins chemo therapy this week.