Newport Beach’s Tiffany Yuhas believes in the power of hope

Tiffany Yuhas no longer had her marriage.

A couple of years later, she no longer had her hair.

What she has rediscovered, though, is her sense of purpose.

As a receptionist, Yuhas is likely the first person a patient will encounter when he or she comes through the front doors of City of Hope Newport Beach. It’s been that way since her first day of work on Feb. 3, 2020, just a week after the facility opened.

She is there to greet the patients with a smile, but also take calls from pharmacies seeking refills, along with a laundry list of other responsibilities.

“I can’t refill, but I have to at least take the medication down and spell it right,” she said. “I’m still learning, but I’m getting the hang of it. You have to have a general blanket knowledge of kind of what everyone’s role is, make sure everybody’s happy. There’s a lot of things we do.”

The 56-year-old Newport Beach resident takes it all in stride. It sure beats the alternative.

In a way, Yuhas is paying it forward. She credits City of Hope for saving her life after she was diagnosed with lymphoma in September 2018. She said she had a CT scan that confirmed it, after she started getting bad headaches following the removal of her ovaries.

The news came just two years after the end of her 25-year marriage.

Yuhas said her doctor at another hospital initially said she was “too far gone” to recover.

“I must have been walking around with it for a while,” she said. “By the time they got me, I had a collapsed lung, and it was in my liver and kidneys. I was totally covered in lymphoma, my whole torso.”

But after the doctor called the City of Hope, Yuhas went via ambulance to the Duarte location. What followed was six rounds of chemotherapy over the next four months. The last round was on Jan. 18, 2019.

Newport Beach resident Tiffany Yuhas is a receptionist at the City of Hope Newport Beach.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Over the next year, she recovered at home, too weak to do much but take a part-time job at a toy store on Balboa Island. Her parents and sons Tanner and Blake all live in Orange County, so at least she had family support.

Then she received a phone call from a longtime friend, who happened to be a human resources director for City of Hope. A new location was opening in Newport Beach, and they had a need for a receptionist.

Yuhas, a longtime school nurse in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, jumped at the opportunity.

“I’m a talker,” she said. “I start conversations. I work with a lot of 20-somethings, which isn’t bad … I could be their mother. It’s good for me, because it keeps me on my toes, but I have to know who everybody is and what they’re talking about. It’s a good balance, I think.”

“Grateful” is a word that Yuhas used multiple times to describe her feelings of working for the City of Hope. That feeling is mutual among other employees.

“It’s just a blessing to have someone like herself employed by us,” said City of Hope Newport Beach physician-in-chief Dr. Edward Kim. “I feel honored that we’re able to have her as an employee. She gets to energize folks because of her personal story, and what it means to her. Many of us have stories when we go into health care or other businesses, but hers is particularly personal.

“I look at it like, ‘Wow, we get to have someone with her type of energy, her type of passion and her type of commitment.’ Each and every person who comes through that door is going to have exposure to that.”

Yuhas has definitely enjoyed the 18 months so far she has spent working for City of Hope, which is building a 190,000-square foot cancer center in Irvine.

“I love where I work, the culture, the way everybody is a team,” she said.

When she isn’t working, Yuhas enjoys activities like reading, going to concerts and being at the beach.

Indeed, she now has a lot to be grateful for. She said she is now cancer free, though she still goes back every two months for checkups.

“For a long time I was just so weak that I couldn’t do anything,” she said, before flashing a big smile. “But boy, have I bounced back.”

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