Learning your child has a serious illness can make any parent's blood run cold. Even when that child is all grown up. Our own reporter Karen Kostko recently battled a cancer called Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I had the chance to talk with Karen and her parents during a recent visit to Wausau. Karen Kostko's parents will never forget the phone call they got from their daughter last April. When they learned doctors found a mass in her chest, they got in their car and drove all night from Ohio to Wausau.

Karen's mom, Nancy Kostko, remembers that long drive.

"Well, I cried most of the way up."

While her dad Joe was determined to get them to Wausau.

"I kept my eye on the road and my mind elsewhere," he says.

That's a road trip the Kostko's made many times during the months that followed. After Karen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, at least one of them was at her side each time she had to undergo a difficult chemotherapy treatment.

Karen says, "I don't think they knew what to expect and I think they were waiting to see how I was gonna get through it."

At first, the Kostko's admit they wanted their only daughter to move back home to Ohio for those cancer treatments, but having just landed her first job out of college, Karen wouldn't even consider it.

"I want you to come home, ” I said. “I don't care if we have to pay the difference or what, I want you to come home,” her mother recalls. "The more we thought about it, we thought she'd probably be better off keeping a normal routine than coming back to Ohio and sitting around for four months."

Her dad says Karen was determined to keep working.

"The first day she got the biopsy she was already making plans. She said, ‘if I can't go in front of the camera, I'll go behind the camera and work, dad.’ It's a great city, but we had never heard of Wausau before Karen moved up here, and we thought Cleveland Clinic, or Akron or Columbus, but after doing research, the medical facilities up here are fantastic"

"I kept reminding them that I was fine and we talked about co-workers, I mean, that was key. I think reassuring them that if they couldn't be here on the drop of a hat, that someone would be. My boss said I could just go on bald for all he cared. I could do whatever I wanted to. That wasn't an option for me!" Karen laughs.

Karen's mom soon learned Karen did have a lot of support in Wausau.

"Her boss is exceptional and her co-workers, and she lives with Paige, who was real supportive and that was the main comfort knowing she had a support system here."

While Karen credits her family and friends with being a huge part of her support system, there's another group of people who get much of the credit, the doctors and nurses who saw her through months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Dr. Rezwan Islam, an oncologist/hematologist at Marshfield Clinic Wausau Center says, "It's a team approach. I wouldn't be able to take good care of her if the support she has surrounding her is not working, so it's really complex and a team approach."

Dr. Darryl Barton, who works in radiation/oncology at UW Cancer Center, says Karen was a great patient.

"I think [what] Karen did right through this whole process was going on with her life and really being a survivor."

And when it comes to being a good patient, Dr. Chong Chin Lee, a cardiovascular surgeon at Marshfield Clinic, says Karen's reporting skills paid off.

"I think Karen gets the title for asking the most questions! She made herself very comfortable in the office, sat herself down and wanted to know everything about what needed to be done. She asked all the right questions."

Several months later Karen is cancer free, which makes this family visit a celebration not just for her remission, but for a family bond that is now somehow even stronger.

"Just knowing they're here no matter what and just seeing my parents, like the first night I found out I had to get a biopsy, they drove 10 hours in the middle of the night. I just feel really lucky," Karen says.

To find more information about Hodgkin's lymphoma, just log on to the American Cancer Society's Web site at www.cancer.org.