Kathleen Joan McGoldrick

Kathleen McGoldrick, 69, of Oviedo Florida passed away 16Apr2018. She was born in Oceanside New York and lived her early years in East Meadow Long Island New York with her mom, step dad and brother Jimmy. Since her step dad was in the service, some of her formative years were spent living in Cheltenham England before returning to East Meadow. After high school, she moved to Hyattsville Maryland with her mom. In Maryland, she briefly married and had one son Michael and worked as a property manager at a number of apartment complexes before eventually working for Government Marketing, an office equipment supply company that focused on servicing federal, state and local governmental agencies.

Tom and Kathleen met at her cousin Pam’s wedding in August 1981. A five-year, long-distance romance commenced, which involved numerous trips back and forth between Massapequa Long Island New York and Rockville Maryland. They were married on 16Aug1986 in East Meadow New York with many friends and relatives in attendance. Once married, Tom and Kathleen lived in Massapequa. Kathleen worked at Cablevision of Long Island until 1990, when Tom transferred to Central Florida with Westinghouse Electric Corporation.

Kathleen and Tom had a house built to custom specifications in Oviedo Florida, where they lived from March 1991 to the present day. Kathleen took great pride with maintaining and improving the house over the years. In the early years living in Oviedo, she worked at a number of places, including a dry cleaner, a toll taker for the Orlando Expressway Authority and finally as a deputy clerk in the Child Support Division of the Orange County Clerk of the Courts. Due to emerging health issues, Kathleen elected to retire in June 2008.

Kathleen’s son Michael had two children from his first marriage; a girl Kayla and a boy Casey. In his early years, Casey spent considerable time staying with his grandmother, fondly known as “GG”. Kathleen was a loving grandmother. However, she hated to be known as “Grandma”. In 2001, Casey came to live with us for over ten years through his grade school, middle school and high school years. He was nurtured into a fine young man, who graduated from Oviedo High School in 2011. After graduation, Casey moved to South Carolina to live with his mother, sister, step-sister and step-brother. Subsequently, he moved in with his dad and step-mother Virginia in Port Saint Lucie Florida before eventually relocating up to Allentown Pennsylvania.

Kathleen’s other loves were the various pets that lived with us over the years, including Dryfuss the cat, Cocker Spaniels Ebony, Heidi, Bailey, Shelby & Levi and a Bichon Frise Lissa. Both Kathleen and Tom doted over all of them as our “four-legged children”.

Kathleen was a “homebody”, who was content watching television and taking care of the Woofers”. She was also serious “news junky”, who held some pretty strong political views, should the subject ever come up.

Shortly after her retirement in 2008, numerous health issues started to plague Kathleen, including chronic back pain, arthritis and diabetes. A trip/slip on the stairs ay Casey’s high school graduation exercise in 2011 resulted in a broken ankle, which required pins and screws to re-set. All of these health issues limited her ability or desire to travel or be very active.

In January 2017, complications in her left foot from a wart eventually resulted in an infection of her 2011 ankle beak, which required Kathleen to be hospitalized. The hardware in her ankle had loosened and an infection of the bone in that area developed. While hospitalized, Kathleen had a previously scheduled and long overdue colonoscopy procedure performed, which revealed she had colon cancer. Due to the ongoing infection in her left leg, chemotherapy was not an immediate remedy. The infection had to be cleared first. After two months of twice daily antibiotic infusions, and the fact that the ankle area was not responding to the antibiotics, the decision was made to amputate the lower portion of her left leg. That operation had to be followed up by about two months of physical therapy so that Kathleen could re-learn how to walk and take care of herself before receiving a prosthetic leg.

Chemotherapy commenced in June 2017 in pill form, which was subsequently upgraded to a more powerful traditional infusion-type chemotherapy regimen in September 2017. In January 2018, a follow-up CT scan revealed that there was not positive progress fighting her stage four colon cancer. Genetic tissue testing was performed in order to identify the most appropriate chemotherapy regimen.

Kathleen only had a few treatments with the new chemotherapy regimen when she developed complications from her cancer. Ultimately, her body was fighting a losing battle. She spent the last week of her life in Winter Park Memorial Hospital before transferring to a Vitas in-patient unit for her last two days. She died peacefully in her sleep at 2:25 AM on 16Apr2018.