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Authors: Robin Roberts,Veronica Chambers

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BOOK: Everybody's Got Something
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In 2007, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, they were both on vacation. It’s rare that that happens. They felt so bad that one of them was not there with me. They vowed right then and there never to be off at the same time. One of them is always with me.

It was all so much fun, but my exhaustion was off the charts. I was so tired, I could barely focus. Truth be known, when I was backstage at the Oscars, I noticed a little lump in my neck. I even asked my producer, Emily, to check it out. When I felt the nodule in my neck, I really wasn’t too concerned. I had a couple of nodules biopsied in recent years and it always turned out to be nothing. I may not have even bothered to have it checked if Amber had not been there. She was the one who insisted something wasn’t quite right with me.

I was about to go on the air for the Red Carpet show when I spotted Amber and Jason. They made such a stunning couple. They made several passes so they could see me in action. It was an incredible year for movies: from Meryl Streep in
The Iron Lady
to Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in
The Help
, from G
eorg
e Clooney in
The Descendants
to the miraculous underdogs, the cast and crew of
The Artist
, who helped make a silent film a smash. Angelina Jolie, dressed in a high-cut black Atelier Versace gown, boldly flashed her right leg, and the resulting memes nearly broke the Internet. I knew, even before I set a single high-heeled foot on that Red Carpet, that it would be a wonderful show, full of moments and memories that I would carry home with me.

I had been told that one day I would wake up and not even think about cancer. When I woke up that Sunday morning before the Oscars, cancer was the furthest thing from my mind. As far as I was concerned it was in my rearview mirror.

T
he first thing that hits you when you come back to New York after being in Los Angeles is the weather. No matter how mild the winter is, it’s never as warm and sunny as LA. If the temps are below freezing, you’re lucky if your plane lands without danger or delay. If you’re
really
lucky, though, when you get back, New York is at its show-off Winter Wonderland best: It’s cold, but not frigid, and the air is filled with big, plump snowflakes that land and rest for a second before melting on your nose or in your hand. On those days, the city is like a movie set or the inside of a snow globe, and when you walk down the street, grown-ups and kids alike are grinning as if Christmas has come all over again. I was lucky when I came back from the Oscars in 2012. It was one of those picture-perfect New York winter days.

Two snowy days after I was back from LA, I went to see Dr. Ruth Oratz, the oncologist who had carefully guided me through breast cancer. Ruth has a calm, soothing style. But there is also a fire in her eyes. She’s passionate about her work. She wants the absolute best for her patients, and she travels the world attending conferences to gain the latest information. I did a lot of research and had visited a lot of hospitals before deciding on Ruth, primarily because she treats only patients with breast cancer. Her office is a warm, inviting setting, not located in a hospital. Her chemotherapy rooms are small and intimate, equipped to hold only two patients. Other places I saw were large, cold, sterile environments. I always opt for warm and cozy.

Ruth checked out the lump in my neck and determined it was nothing to worry about. But since I was there, she wanted to draw blood. I had done that on a regular basis, but it had been six months since my last test. Usually after a blood test, I get a call from one of Ruth’s stellar nurses like Beth, telling me that all is fine. But one day passed and no nurse called. Then it was two days. By the third day, I was willing the phone to ring. Then Ruth finally called. “Your counts are a little lower than usual,” she said. “I’m not too concerned. It could be from all the travel, or maybe you picked up a little virus. Let’s wait a couple of weeks and then have more blood drawn.”

Honestly, I didn’t think too much about it. I had a few minor scares since completing my breast cancer treatment in 2008. Thankfully, it always turned out to be nothing. For the first couple of years, I was worried my cancer might return. But eventually, the fear subsided. I just wanted to live life to the fullest, and that was exactly what I was doing.

*  *  *

Before I joined
GMA
, I spent nearly fifteen years at ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports broadcasting. When I graduated college, I had one goal—become a sports anchor at ESPN. I worked hard to get there, market after market, Hattiesburg to Biloxi, Biloxi to Nashville, Nashville to Atlanta, then eventually to ESPN.

ESPN is based in Connecticut, where I still have a home. Once, when I was still at ESPN, there was a giant snowstorm. Schools were shut down. A lot of offices were shut down, too. I thought, “I don’t want to go to work.” I called my friends Jo and Kim and they said, “We don’t want to go to work either—let’s play hooky.” But I was scheduled to anchor
SportsCenter
. So I called in and said, “Um, yeah, I’m not going to be able to make it. The roads are too bad.”

They said, “But Robin, you have a big SUV.”

I said, “Yeah, but I’m…you know, I don’t know how to drive in snow really well.”

They said, “Well, what if we send somebody to pick you up?”

I said, “No, that’s okay. See, I’m Southern and I don’t really want to be in a car through a snowstorm.”

So they gave me the day off.

My friends and I played in the snow all day. Then we went to Naples Pizza and
SportsCenter
was on. Several people turned to me and said, “Aren’t you…” I just smiled and said, “Yep, but you don’t see me here. You don’t see me!”

When I think of my closest friends, like Jo and Kim, they are all from the eighties and nineties. I am most comfortable with people who knew me before I was on national TV every day. They are so amused when folks come up to me asking for an autograph. When someone wants to buy me a drink, my friends like to joke: “Robin can afford it, buy us a drink!”

*  *  *

That February, as I waited the two weeks for my next blood test, I tried to shake off the exhaustion that was my constant companion. No matter how much I slept, I woke up bone tired. It was winter. I wasn’t feeling well and I desperately wanted a sick day. But when you’re on morning TV, there is no calling in sick just because you’re feeling punky and you want to sleep in. Your job is to help all the people who don’t want to get out of bed start their day on a positive, well-informed, entertaining note. You don’t call in because you want to spend the day 
in your PJs, 
watching movies in bed. And you certainly don’t call in because you want to frolic in the snow with your friends. Can you
imagine
how many iPhone videos would show up online if I called in and then went to Central Park to play in the snow with my dog and my friends?

Every once in a while, my friends and I gather at my home in Connecticut. Those are fun times when I’ve got my beloved dog, KJ, with me and we all bundle up and go out for a walk. It only takes one snowball to start a fight. Someone balls one up and then it’s
on
.

There’s an art to throwing snowballs. You’ve got to make them quickly and efficiently. You’ve got to aim them with both speed and precision. Then you’ve got to run like the dickens when they start coming your way. With snowballs, you’ve got to be able to dish ’em and take ’em.

After I had the second set of blood work done, I waited for the all-clear call. When Dr. Oratz called, I could tell from the tone of her voice something was wrong. She said, “Robin, you need to see a specialist.” Her words came hurling at me like a dirty snowball, the bad news a block of ice packed in the fresh, soft flakes of her care and concern. But I couldn’t run from the voice at the other end of the phone. I couldn’t dodge the news that was coming my way. I did what we do when we can’t measure the threat or manage our fear. I froze.

T
he next step, the doctors explained, would be to have a bone marrow biopsy. Let me try to explain what I understood. When you’re sick, but you don’t look it and you don’t yet
feel
it, your body can do a good job of harboring the fugitive illness. A bone marrow biopsy is like a SWAT team sent in to search a high-rise building. If something is hiding, the procedure will find it out.

It’s a painful procedure: A long needle penetrates your skin, then your flesh, then the bone and into the middle of the bone. It’s from there that they take out the marrow. It’s the furthest from the outside of your body that you can get to the inside of your body. But it is effective. So as I lay on the table, I willed my mind to not focus on the discomfort, but on the outcome. When this test was over, I would know what was wrong. Maybe I had developed some kind of anemia. Maybe I had caught a bad virus, and because I’d powered through my exhaustion for the Oscars, it had turned into something I now had to address. A severe case of mono would explain both the elevated white counts and the exhaustion.

There’s a story I’ve told before. When I was a freshman basketball player at Southeastern Louisiana University, my coach, Linda Puckett, devised a challenging drill. She instructed the team to stay in a crouched position as we slid all the way around the court. We were not to stand up until we reached a certain point. I was in the middle of the pack as we did the drill. When we were finished, Coach Puckett got right in my face and said, “Hon, you are going places in life.” It turned out that I was the only one who remained in the crouched position for the entire time.

When it comes to the things that matter, like my health, I have a great ability to focus. Back in March 2012, I thought that was all this was about—something in my body was telling me it needed my attention. I was confident that if I focused on my health, went to the doctors, did what they told me, everything would soon be back to normal.

A recurrence of cancer must’ve been nestled in the back of my mind, but my oncologist had sent me to have tests done on my blood cells. If the nodule had been of concern, another tumor developing, then Ruth would have taken the lead. I didn’t think that another round of cancer was what I was facing.

That was the end of March. After my appointment, I headed off for a much-needed weeklong vacation. Amber and I like to go to Key West during Final Four weekend. Where would you rather be when you’re watching college basketball? Inside an arena or outdoors? We opt for the latter. We can position the television in our house so we can watch it from the pool. I’m being very generous when I say pool; it’s about the size of a large bathtub. But it’s great. Actually, it’s perfect.

I treasure my vacations. I don’t have to worry about 3:45 a.m. wakeup calls. No need for me to spend an hour in a makeup chair or get dressed up in the latest fashion. On vacation, if I’m not in my swimsuit, I’m in a pair of board shorts, Kai-Kai flip-flops and a ratty tank top. That’s the beauty of Key West. It’s very laid-back, easygoing. I’ve been going for so many years that I even get local discounts. The only problem is when a cruise ship is in port. The tourists, who aren’t locals, come up and ask for autographs and pictures. I don’t mind, but I enjoy being just an anonymous local so much more.

A group of friends and I have owned a little two-bedroom bungalow in an unassuming neighborhood for years. We have rocking chairs on the front porch and a white picket fence. Our neighbor next door, Tom, gives the best massages on the island. A few doors down, walking distance, is our favorite restaurant for dinner, the Flaming Buoy Filet Co.—you must have the spicy chocolate quesadilla for dessert. And right around the corner from our house in the heart of Old Town is the most authentic family-friendly Cuban restaurant, El Siboney. It’s a hidden jewel and a local hot spot, especially for lunch. Their homemade sangria is out of this world. That’s pretty much how I spend my time in Key West: eat, drink and be merry.

  

My favorite part about spending time in Key West is riding my bike everywhere. We have these old bikes: mine is orange, Amber’s is white, but they both have sweet and cheesy floral baskets. Our bikes are so old you can hear us coming from a mile away—we just
squeak, squeak, squeak
down the road. We always take the back roads and go past the cemetery. My favorite tombstone says, “See? I told you I was sick.” It’s so much the spirit of Key West that even the gravestones make you smile.

But this time it was also Katie Couric week. She had agreed to sit in for me when I was on vacation. I want to make it abundantly clear that Katie and I are
good
. We like each other and have always had the utmost respect for each other. No problemo whatsoever. Got it? Our show had been fighting an intense ratings war for months, and we were just on the brink of overtaking the
Today
show, Katie’s former team. Keep in mind they had an incredible 852-week winning streak going. So having Katie as a guest host made news and invited speculation. Plus our network ran endless promos touting her return to morning TV. Perhaps we could have explained it to the audience a little better, but many viewers thought I was going to be fired and replaced by Katie.

There was an upside. So many people felt sorry for me and thought that I was going to lose my job, that everywhere we went people wanted to treat us to dinner and drinks. It’s such a wonderful element of the human spirit: how we cheer for the (perceived) underdog. People kept asking, “Are you worried about this?” All I could think was that my back hurt from the bone marrow aspiration and I’m waiting for this call. I thought, “The doctor will call. Like they always do and they’ll give me the all clear.”

It wasn’t until I was back from vacation that I finally got the phone call. It had been a week and a half, going on two weeks, since my bone marrow biopsy. It was so stressful waiting for the results while contending with the postvacation blues. I wasn’t poolside. I wasn’t on my bike. I was back at work, still feeling under the weather and exhausted, waiting for that dang phone to ring.

I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in my den, watching TV and I answered the phone. It was the specialist. The times I’d talked to him before, he’d had a joking manner, which I liked. Right away, I could tell from the tone of his voice that this was serious. I just didn’t know how serious. He went on to describe in medical terms what he had discovered in the bone marrow. Pending further tests, all indications were MDS.

I said, “Slow down, slow down.”

He said, “MDS.”

I said, “I have MS? Multiple sclerosis?”

He said, “No, not MS. Myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare disease that we used to call pre-leukemia.”

I was so confused. “I have pre-leukemia?”

He explained what myelodysplastic syndrome was and how I’d have to come in for further testing. He explained that MDS was actually an umbrella term for a group of diseases that affect the blood and bone marrow. The range of diseases ranged from “mild and easily managed” to “severe and life-threatening.” He said that while MDS presented primarily in patients over the age of sixty, you could be affected at any age. He also said that one of the concerns was that depending on what kind of MDS my system showed, it might develop into a severe form of leukemia called acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML. In AML, the bone marrow revolts on the body entirely, creating clusters of cancerous cells called leukemic blasts that can build up and overtake the healthy cells in your body. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he explained. “What we know is that the preliminary results indicate MDS, and we must begin to act quickly to get as much information about how the disease is presenting itself in your particular case.”

I just sat back on the couch. I was numb. I had no idea what this was. None. Then I went and did the very thing we always tell people not to do—and that’s go on the Internet. The terms that kept coming up, again and again, were: “leukemia,” “bone marrow transplant,” “poor survival” and “dead.”

It scared the daylights out of me. A half an hour before, I’d never even heard of MDS. I was on the computer and I couldn’t even spell “myelodysplastic syndrome.” I was just reading scary fact after fact about the prognosis and survivability. Maybe I was just hitting all the wrong pages, but it was not good. I remember I started shaking. I was alone and I just started crying hysterically. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

BOOK: Everybody's Got Something
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