Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va., Business Profile Column

By Iris Taylor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

Mar. 14–She competed in a biathlon, a triathlon and a marathon.

Now, businesswoman Kathleen Watch Wilcox faces her most formidable foe, multiple sclerosis.

Who knew why one day in the early 1990s, the tennis pro awoke paralyzed on the right side of her body.

“I was like, holy crud,” she said, and went to a doctor. “I was dragging my right side. I was a hunchback. He put me on steroids.”

Two weeks later, Watch competed in a tennis tournament anyway. But “I played like a gunk.”

A day later, she moved from Michigan to Virginia and a job as a tennis director at a country club in Richmond.

That was in 1993. During the next several years, even as the quirky symptoms of MS came and went undiagnosed, Watch rode a mountain bike, played tennis and competed in a marathon, biathlon and triathlon in Washington and Virginia. She sky-dived and piloted a Cessna four-seater, too.

Then, in 1996 came the devastating news, a diagnosis of relapse-remitting multiple sclerosis, a common form of the disease characterized by flare-ups and remissions. Multiple sclerosis is an incurable, sometimes debilitating, disease of the central nervous system. It affects about 400,000 people nationwide, 10,000 in Virginia, mostly women.

“I went over the edge,” Watch Wilcox said recently. “It was mind-changing. I needed therapy. I went down before I went back up. I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’”

What she did was start a business, Kathleen’s Fudge & Fun Stuff in Midlothian’s Sycamore Square Shopping Village. “When you’re in business, you make your own destiny,” she said.

But first, she carefully researched the venture, traveling to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to observe how tourist shops ran their businesses and to Hawaii to observe how cocoa beans are grown and processed. She took an eight-week business plan course at the Small Business Development Center in Richmond. “She studies everything,” said Kathleen’s Fudge employee Susie Willis of Midlothian. “She studied her candy store before she opened it. She took two years to do the research.” Also, “she is constantly studying her disease. It’s amazing to see all she does.”

Watch opened her fudge shop on Sept. 1, 1998. By then, MS had forced her to almost stop playing tennis because hot weather immobilized her playing arm. She still competed in mountain-bike races, with their jagged twists, turns and log jumping until MS robbed her of balance. She tried hang gliding, too.

But she stopped flying because, “If I lost my hands up in the air, who is going to fly the plane?”

Soon, she stopped all endurance sports because they were too exhausting. But characteristic of her propensity to open new doors when old ones slam shut, she took up playing competitive Scrabble on the Internet.

Once, she flew to Minnesota to scrub the house of a woman to whom she lost a Scrabble bet.

By 1999, Watch’s insurance plan had run out, and the cost of her medical care skyrocketed. So she sold her Jeep and rode a bike to the fudge shop.

In 2002, she married Robert Lee Wilcox of Powhatan County, an administrator at Spectra Quest, a computer-software developer in Richmond. Their family consists of nine kittens and three dogs, all rescued.

In 2003, Watch Wilcox expanded the fudge shop, taking over the space of an adjacent business that vacated.

Today, she tends shop and leans on employees when she’s having bad days. “I’ve always had very understanding employees,” she said. “I have good people who help me.”

Some days she is plagued with fatigue, headache and numbness. It can be “just very difficult to function,” she said. Also, because she does not look ill, it is difficult for people to understand when she is suffering.

“People [with MS] who run a business — they don’t call in sick if they’re successful,” said Melina Davis-Martin, president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society in Richmond. “They fight through it and decide they will win. Kathleen is not only an example, but a shining example, of that.”

Watch Wilcox said having an athletic body fortifies her against more devastating effects of MS. She still jogs once a week and does elliptical training. She also participates in the Positive Thinkers support group of the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

She has other things going for her, too: a supportive husband, the thorough preparation she did before starting the business and a good business plan.

Preparation can reduce the failure rate of a new venture by 50 percent, said Mike Leonard, executive director of the Small Business Development Center. “Kathleen is a good example. Here it is 7 1/2 years later and her business is still doing well.”

MS has curtailed Watch Wilcox’s future business plans, though. “Physically, I just can’t handle a big store,” she said. “It’s just too hard on me. But it’s OK.”

She acknowledges that MS has been her most formidable foe. “I could wake up paralyzed tomorrow,” she said.

But she refuses to let the disease own her.

“You realize what you can and can’t do,” she said. “I have a choice to be down or to choose life. I chose to live a happy life.”

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