Robert Shelstrom:
CLASS OF 1971
Stagg High SchoolClass of 1971
Palos hills, IL
Worth Elementary SchoolClass of 1968
Worth, IL
Robert's Story
Life
Graduated from the University of Illinois with a BS in Civil Engineering, received a Masters Degree from IIT in Mechanical Engineering.
I took a "sabatical" from engineering management in the late 1990s to be a high school physics teacher, college math and science instructor.I did this because I'm deeply concerned about the state of education in this country and our community, and I wanted to spend more time with my kids when they were young and keep my wife from going nuts with three small children at home!
I got married for the first time in 1988. We had our first daughter in 1990 (graduated from Illinois State U ikn Marketing Communications and is working in HR for Vital Proteins) and the boy and girl twins in 1995.They graduated from Arizona State University in Tempe and both graduated from W. P. Carey school of business there, my son in Supply Chain Management and my daughter in Global Logistics. My son is a manager at Amazon distribution and my daughter is a manager at Stream Logistics.
My wife was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, grew up in Sao Paolo, Brasil and graduated from St Xavier in nursing.
I'm the kind of person who gets involved whenever I see corruption, dishonesty and failure in our po...Expand for more
litical systems, which pretty much keeps me involved in one cause or another.
I've been involved with supporting candidates in all three parties. I've found there are heroes and crooks in each party, but it seems that the controlling party usually has the most crooks at any given time.
Six years ago I found out I had Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, an incurable disease that has no treatment and is terminal within 3-5 years. In 2017 it got so bad that I couldn't go to the bathroom without my oxygen levels getting down to about 50%. My lung function was down to about 20%.
I would've been dead by Christmas f I didn't get a double lung transplant, which I was blessed to receive from St Joseph hospital of Phoenix, one of the top lung transplant programs in the world, back in November of 2017. Since then I've had some challenges, but overall I'm in better condition than I've been in two decades with exercise and diet.
Life expectancy after transplant is at a 55% survival rate 5 years after the procedure. Living with the prospect of death so long, you stop worrying about it and just decide to savor life and do as much good as you can for as long as you can. Isn't that something we all should be doing anyway?
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