A recent edition of WV Living Magazine featured its annual “Best Of” list that was featured earlier this week on Connect-Bridgeport. The annual special addition also includes a list of “Community Champions” for each of the regions in the state.

Harrison County and most of North Central West Virginia are listed as “Mountaineer Country.” The community champion winner for 2024 is Bridgeport’s Cassie Busdeker.

Busdeker is a lifelong Bridgeport resident, a Bridgeport High School graduate, and a major proponent of the place she calls home. In fact, she has taken love for her community and has served it as the executive director of the Greater Bridgeport Convention & Visitors Bureau for the last five years.

The selection comes after Busdeker not only battled for her life by going through a successful liver transplant surgery at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh this past June but managed during a substantial portion of the ordeal to keep up with her duties leading the CVB. Busdeker managed to do this for more than a year despite dozens, if not more than a hundred, of medical appointments and treatments that saw progress and setbacks.

Her surgery in June came after she began noticing physical concerns that required medical attention in November of 2022. For months, physicians were unable to determine what was causing her health issues. She was initially diagnosed with hemochromatosis before learning a rare gene complicated her condition.

Busdeker has an Alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency, which means she does not make enough AAT. AAT is a protein responsible for protecting the lungs and liver from damage. The deficiency impacted her liver which led to cirrhosis and the eventual liver transplant, which she continues to recover from – and continues work as she does.

The magazine described the situation as this:

Busdeker, also a graduate of West Virginia University, and her husband Brant are the parents of two daughters – Alex and Tory. She is the daughter of Dean and Caroline Ramsey.