But this vitality and zest for life wasn’t always the case for the 66-year-old. There was a time when it took all of her energy just to get dressed in the morning, and by the time she made it to the front door, she felt like she needed to sit down and rest. Compounding the exhaustion were migraine headaches and a sense of vertigo that kept her in bed, often unable to even lift her head.

“You just want to sit still,” she says of her illness. “You don’t even want to look up to look at people.”

Between the physical stress of moving and the emotional toll of going out, Bobbie felt sick most of the time. “I would be seasick and nauseous all the time. Even when I laid down sometimes and I had migraines – and that would be a good day -- I was so sick.”

Until then, Bobbie had always been active and full of life. She studied fine arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and received a scholarship to study in Greece for a semester, where she ended up staying for a few years before returning to the United States.

In the 1990s, Bobbie started to notice that she was constantly feeling tired. Specialists couldn’t figure out what was causing her symptoms, “I thought, well, they can’t do anything for me”. Then a friend showed her an article on growth hormone deficiency. “She said, ‘Bobbie, this sounds like you,’” she recalls.

Tests showed that Bobbie had panhypopituitarism, a disorder that was causing her pituitary gland to malfunction, which resulted in a lack of certain hormones.

“It turned out I had no trace of growth hormone in my system.”

Once she was diagnosed, her doctor prescribed the medication she needed and almost immediately she felt better. “I noticed a difference right away, the first day. Until then it was horrible.”

Bobbie lives on a fixed income and pays for her own insurance. At $3,000 per year, her treatments are more than she can afford on her own.

Without Patient Access Network, Bobbie says, “I couldn’t pay for it.”

The main benefit of receiving proper care is Bobbie’s ability to function day to day. “The other difference is quality of life, where you wonder if you even want to be alive.”

With her medication, Bobbie says, “the difference is very extreme.”

Today, she lives in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, and teaches a drawing class at Atlantic Cape Community College in nearby Atlantic City. “I like teaching because I believe in what I’m teaching. It’s fun. And the kids, you can have an impact on them. They take it seriously.”

When she’s not passing on her knowledge to her students, you can find her in the pool playing deep water volleyball. And once the weather warms up, many evenings she’s on the boardwalk drawing caricatures of vacationers.

“I’m younger in the summer when I’m working every day,” she says with a smile in her voice.

And thanks to the care she receives Bobbie is living every day to the fullest.