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How author Amanda Dugger kept smiling in tough times
“I’m often people’s first call when they’re diagnosed, or when their friends are diagnosed. I want to help people know what to ask next.”
It’s always something.
Amanda Dugger has a lot on her plate. She’s CEO of DGR Systems, an IT consulting and solutions firm, Chair of Tampa Bay Tech and the founder and president of Genuine Human, a nonprofit connecting philanthropic gifts with those who need them the most.
She’s also the busy mother of a 5-year-old daughter.
And she’s a two-time cancer survivor.
It’s that last identifier that led to Dugger’s brand-new memoir, Finding Sparkle in the Sh*t Show (St. Petersburg Press). The book is honest, raw and devastatingly funny, the latter no small feat considering the lifetime of landmines (she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as a teenager) Dugger has been forced to navigate.
Her conversation is peppered with a deep, throaty, Gomer Pyle sort of laugh. The Missouri native lays claim to inheriting her find-the-silver-lining sense of humor (and gentle way with sarcasm) from her father, Ed Carter.
She was driven to chronicle her trials and tribulations, Dugger reports, “in a way that I think kind of brings validity to the scars ya got, in a way that helps you feel like it all wasn’t in vain. And that people can learn from it.
“Especially when I’m recollecting things from 20-plus years ago, and the first cancer I had … I wish I had a copy of that old blog, before blog was even a term – I would almost want to go back and read it.”
Sometimes, all I could manage was a couple sentences. Other times, I was able to share reflections and occasionally even surprise myself by saying something close to profound. The word spread through my family, friends, and friends of friends. Occasionally, I’d receive messages from complete strangers. The knowledge that there was a whole community out there rooting for me bolstered my spirits through the difficult days ahead. – from Finding Sparkle
Dugger describes herself as a “fixer” in both her personal and professional lives. “I’m often people’s first call when they’re diagnosed, or when their friends are diagnosed,” she explains. “I want to help people know what to ask next. Where to go next.
“Usually, I preface each conversation with a newly-diagnosed person or family member with ‘If you’re calling for the sympathy, I’m not your call. If you have questions that you want to ask me, or if you want to ask my advice, that’s what you’re gonna get from me.’
“And they usually feel better, but they might not be prepared for that conversation. So I always make sure to ask ‘What do you need right now? If you need to unload and tell me, and have me give you the sympathy you deserve and desire, there’s room for that too.’
“But I will immediately go into problem-solving mode, because I just can’t help myself.”
Dugger and her husband Jason moved to the Tampa Bay area in 2008. Her newly-widowed father (he’s a prominent character in Finding Sparkle) followed a few years later.
After he died, she made a surprising discovery about her heritage (no spoilers here) and disappeared down a lengthy familial rabbit role. “It became consuming in an appropriate way, and helped me get past some things I needed to get past,” Dugger says. “The energy that needed to go somewhere had a place to go. Everything seems to be a project for me, apparently.”
She and Jason welcomed their first child in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was raging. And then, Amanda Dugger was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Having cancer for the second time is like a slap to the face. After everything I’ve been through – losing my parents, infertility, That Other Thing – I felt like I’d finally gotten my life on track.
Typically, she went looking for the sparkle. “When you’re first diagnosed, you don’t know any different. You don’t know that there’s 15 different types of breast cancer. Everyone thinks that breast cancer is breast cancer, and chemotherapy is chemotherapy. Well, it’s not. Everything is very unique and different.
“And some people, when they’re going through it or after they’ve gone through it, they just didn’t seek out those details because they just didn’t care. They just let their doctor make all the decisions.
“But I wasn’t that person.”
Genuine Human was a product of Dugger’s “fixer” mentality. “I feel like … even in our IT industry, if you can educate the customer, you’re in a better spot, right? If you can educate the patient, they’re going to feel better about being in control of their outcome.”
A Genuine Human is the salt of the earth, honest to a fault, human in the deepest sense of the word. When I chose to name my foundation Genuine Human, it was to honor every genuine human, but especially to honor my dad. Whatever stuff he was made of, the more of that we have on this planet, the better.
“Yes, you can point to the statistics from the American Cancer Society, or the American Heart Association or whomever else, and say that all the giving helped something be possible. But it really pulls at your heartstrings if you say ‘Hey, these kids need to go to summer camp. They’ve never gone to summer camp because they’re sick and they can’t board a commercial flight. So we’re going to send them on an Angel Flight.’ Which is pilots that volunteer their time and get these kids to summer camps. And all we have to do is raise enough money for the fuel.
“We’re showing people where their money went. And when you can do that, the flywheel really starts spinning. Because people really enjoy seeing what they donated to.”
Finding Sparkle in the Sh*t Show – A Memoir of My Dad, My Cancer, and Ham in the Fridge is available from St. Petersburg Press, and at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg.
