Being raised on a farm, Cindy Abbott remembers one day climbing so far up a tree in her front yard that her dad had to call the fire department to get her down.

Climbing trees was just the beginning for the Cal State Fullerton health science professor. At the age of 51, she has climbed some of the world's tallest mountains. In May she achieved the goal of embarking on one of the biggest adventures of her life: summiting Mt. Everest.

She was a tomboy and to give her a doll was an insult. Abbott says she has always been this way. An adventurer, not a risk taker.

"Some people go to find something. I wasn't going to find myself. I knew who I was," Abbott said. "For me, I went with the goal of standing on top of the world. Then once I was diagnosed, I went with the goal of standing on top of the world with a banner."

From Undiagnosed to Climbing Mt. Everest

The diagnosis come three years before she summited the highest mountain in the world. After nearly 14 years of not knowing what was going on with her body, the news came as a relief to Abbott.

"It's all positive because it has a name now," Abbott said.

On Aug. 1, 2007, Abbott was told she had Limited Wegener's Granulomatosis. A rare disease in which her immune system is attacking itself and now trying to destroy her blood vessels. The disease has left one of her eyes functionally blind, which in turn served at the first sign of diagnosis.

Abbott's decision to climb Mt. Everest came in 2006 after watching the Discovery show,
"Everest Beyond the Limit."

"I turned to my husband and said, ‘I think I have to go do that,'" Abbott said.

Her husband, Larry Abbott, is a CSUF scuba instructor and accompanied her to many training climbs. Their 30-year-old daughter Teshia has also inherited their adventure seeking traits and even volunteered at a lion reserve in Zimbabwe for a month.

After her diagnosis, she decided to shift the focus of her journey to bringing awareness to the disease and the 7,000 other rare diseases that go undiagnosed.

"I'm sort of an anomaly with my disease and I don't let it take me down," Abbott said. "My whole thing is getting the awareness campaigning going."

In the simplest terms, Abbott says Mt. Everest is amazing and extremely hard. She maintains a positive outlook even as the disease affects her life and attributes much of her accomplishments in life to an amazing ability to focus.

"I am extremely stubborn and just focused on climbing that mountain," she said. "Whatever I had to do to get through that day and that's what kept me sane and anchored. The mental strength is what did it."

Reaching Beyond the Clouds

Of the 3,000 individuals who've summited Everest, 250 were females from across the world and 40 were American females. According to the statistician Abbott spoke to, it would make her the 39th climber and the oldest woman to summit this year. Achieving such a feat would come with its struggles.

Abbott began her climb on April 1 and returned 60 days later. Having no climbing experience at all, she started training three years ago by taking on other mountains including Mt. Rainier and Mt. Whitney. The climb tested her strengths – physically, mentally and emotionally – and at times had doubts that she would never get the chance to summit.

Climbers trekking the mountain are all faced with a very small window of opportunity to reach its peak. A window that is hardly ever accessible because of constant jet streams, storms and typhoons.

With only three days left and now going on their third attempt up, Abbott and her team members decided to summit at 9 p.m. the next night along with 80 other climbers. It would take 12 hours to summit with every little step taking 20 minutes.

"I came up and thought, ‘Wow, this is a really great view.' Then it dawned on me that the summit was no bigger than a bench. It was no relief at all. It was very purposeful," Abbott said.

On the descent, Abbott would overcome several obstacles that came her way, including the freezing of both of her corneas leaving her with an inability to see anything.

The group of five continued their way down the Lhotse Face, at 3,700 ft. altitude, eventually making it to Camp 2 in a complete whiteout.

"We didn't know whether we were stepping off a 5,000 foot cliff or not," Abbott said. "The air is just white and you can't see anything. We had a line and you just hang onto that line."

The climbers finally reached base camp where Abbott was told by an Everest doctor that her vision would be fine and her frostbitten fingertips would fall off and regrow in three months. She lost a total of 10 percent body weight and like most climbers, would just eat and sleep for weeks once home.

Paving the Way for Awareness

It's been five months since Abbott held a banner in honor of the research organizations, yet she still embodies the same unwavering support as she did on Everest. She continuously works with the National Organization of Rare Diseases and the Vasculitis Foundation to get people interested in research.

In order to get the media involved early on, she did extensive interviews chronicling her climb to promote awareness on the several incurable diseases that affect people around her. Press coverage included a segment covering the climb on ABC "World News" with Diane Sawyer and interviews with National Public Radio and the Orange County Register.

Kathy Koser, associate dean of the College of Health and Human Development, sees Abbott's journey as a story of perseverance and the importance of having a positive attitude.

"The bigger story is the impact she has with those who come in contact with her," Koser said.

She was most recently recognized in Orange County Weekly's "Best of OC 2010: Personal Bests," and Orange County Metro's "Hot 25" of 2010.

It was from her publicity campaign that she decided to start writing a book that follows her journey from the moment she decided to climb Mt. Everest, through the diagnosis and then the coming home. She is currently looking for a publisher and part of the funds from the book will go to the research foundation.

"I'm not a writer and I had no intention of writing, but people ask me the question of ‘How was it?' and it's almost indescribable," Abbott said.

Health science major Vanessa Flores first heard of Abbott in a presentation she gave at the Women's Center and remembers sitting there in amazement as Abbott shared her life struggles and accomplishments to others.

"Cindy's story inspires us to go above and beyond in our daily lives," Flores said. "She never lets anything bring her down even in the face of adversity."

Juggling teaching, keeping up with a website and blog and writing a book while undergoing a debilitating disease, would prove to be a stressful workload for anyone. Abbott, however, shows no signs of slowing down.

"You've got to dream and go for it, disease or not," Abbott said. "Too many people just sit home and then they wake up one day and go, ‘Where'd my life go?' and that will never happen to me."