Everybody's Got Something (4 page)

Amber and I were both on the edge of our chairs directly across from him. I appreciated that he didn’t talk just to me but to Amber as well, making sure that she felt a part of the conversation and process. “So myelodysplastic syndrome, what does that even mean?” he began. “Well, myelo is bone marrow. Most people don’t even know what the bone marrow is other than that they might have eaten it as osso buco in an Italian restaurant. Most people don’t know what the bone marrow does, so the first thing we talk about is, the bone marrow is a very important organ. You need your heart, you need your brain, you need your lungs and you need your bone marrow. Your bone marrow makes blood cells. It makes the white blood cells that fight infection, and it makes red blood cells that carry around oxygen and it makes platelets—little tiny cells that help you clot. So when we’re talking about the bone marrow, we’re talking about your body’s ability to make the three blood cells that give you life. If your bone marrow doesn’t work, you’ve got problems with the production of these three life-saving cell lines.”

Amber and I looked at each other as if we’d just been dropped into a med school biology class and neither one of us had read the books or reviewed the notes. We were following along, but just barely.

The doctor could tell that we didn’t really understand the severity of my condition. It was as if he thought, “Maybe this will get your attention.” He put my stats and test results in a computer. There was a graph showing one year and two years with a dot in the middle. He turned the computer screen so Amber and I could see the dot.

I asked, “What’s that?”

At first, I thought I had one to two years to do something about what I was facing.

He said, “That’s your life expectancy if you don’t do anything.”

One to two years? That was my life expectancy? It couldn’t be. Just moments before I was drinking champagne with my colleagues, celebrating a victory that had been years in the making. It was as if I were looking at my life through a kaleidoscope. One moment it was all bright confetti, the next moment it was just a sliver of light bursting through clouds of darkness.

Once it had sunk in, I kicked into warrior mode. I leaned forward and slapped my fists on his desk and said: “Okay, what do we do?”

The specialist said, “The only possible cure is a bone marrow transplant.”

I remember hearing that word
cure
, and I hung on to that sliver of hope for all it was worth. There was a chance we could defeat this, game over. A chance was all I needed.

A
fter the appointment, I dropped Amber off at her apartment and headed home. I needed time alone to digest the news. I’d just been told that I had less than two years to live if I didn’t have a transplant. In order to have a transplant, I needed to find a near-perfect match. I had no idea what that would entail.

I was so relieved to enter the refuge that is my apartment. KJ greeted me exuberantly, and I hugged her back. Good news or bad, number one or number 101, she has nothing but love for me. I sat on the sofa next to my big picture window and looked out onto the Hudson River. One of the first things that came to mind was my dear friend, the legendary college basketball coach, Pat Summitt.

The first time I met Pat was in 1987, when I was a cub TV sports reporter down the road in Nashville. Her University of Tennessee Lady Vols had just won their first NCAA championship. It was the beginning of a history-making streak that made Pat the all-time winningest coach in NCAA basketball history, man or woman. Pat and I have been good friends ever since. In 2011, at the age of fifty-nine, Pat was diagnosed with early onset dementia linked to Alzheimer’s disease. She said at the time: “There’s not going to be any pity party and I’ll make sure of that.” She went on to coach the Lady Vols the following season and then stepped aside, and she is now head coach emeritus. The way she has faced her illness with such grace and strength is admirable. She is still teaching us all invaluable lessons.

Every time I see Pat, I wonder, “Is this the time she won’t remember me?” But I know that I will never forget the many things she has taught me, including this: When you are down and you don’t know how to pick yourself up, start where you are. I can hear Pat’s voice saying the words in my head, “Left foot, right foot, breathe.”

Left foot, right foot, breathe
could describe my entire life the spring of 2012. Even after meeting with the doctor and receiving that devastating news, I didn’t have much time to sit with the news of my diagnosis. I had about an hour, then I needed to change clothes to attend the wake of the mother of my longtime producer, Karen Leo. Her mother had passed away from cancer. At the viewing, Karen was so appreciative that many of us were there to support her. She knew this was a big day for our show, but we are family first, and we were there when Karen needed us. I was not the only one on an emotional roller coaster on the day that our show became number one. Karen had to orchestrate her dear mother’s homegoing service. I mean, truly—we’ve all got something.

After the wake, I went back home to change for the big party the network was throwing to celebrate our win. Number one for the first time after 852 weeks. I was fried. I could hardly believe my day: number one, MDS, Karen’s mom,
GMA
party. I put on some skinny jeans and my favorite jean jacket lined with Hermès silk. The
GMA
party was only a few buildings down from my apartment on the same street overlooking the Hudson River.

When I got downstairs, Sam, Josh and Lara were standing at the front door of my apartment building. I was so excited to see them! I thought that maybe somehow they all realized what I’d been going through and they were there to comfort me and escort me to the party down the street.
Welllll
…actually they were a little tipsy from celebrating and they were lost. We had a good laugh and walked arm in arm down the street to our rooftop party. People stopped us along the way and congratulated us.

It was a gorgeous April evening on the rooftop. I remember I just held my breath for a moment as I took in the brilliance of the early springtime sun setting over the Hudson. Our house DJ, the one and only DJ Kiss, was spinning the best dance tunes. Everyone was so incredibly happy. We finally did it. We finally broke the streak and beat the
Today
show after 852 weeks. Sam and I did the limbo…how low can you go?!

I almost told Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, on that rooftop what I had learned just hours ago. I almost took him aside and said, “I have MDS. If I don’t find a match, I have less than two years to live.” But seeing his smiling face, listening to the booming beats of one of the best dance parties I have ever been to, I couldn’t do it. How could I? I was looking at him, beaming, proud—and rightly so—of all we were able to accomplish under his leadership. I couldn’t dampen all that joy with my dire news.

I looked around at the team. We have such a hardworking and young staff, especially the overnight shift. They are the ones who in the wee hours are putting the final touches on the show while we sleep. Many of them had to leave the party early to get back to work, but not before we took picture after picture on that magical rooftop.

Before I left the party, I stole a few moments for myself. I walked over to the quieter end of the rooftop and just took in each and every person, the warmth and hope on all of their jubilant faces. This was a moment that they had dreamed of, too. It wasn’t how I had imagined it would be, secretly sitting with my heartbreaking news, but I prayed it was for every one of them. Thank God I could say that I had truly enjoyed the journey, because if I had saved all of my joy for the destination, I would have missed it. We are all so focused on getting “there,” but you have to be careful. Sometimes, I sense a lot of times, “there” ends up feeling different than you expected.

It was difficult not to let my mind wander. If I found myself on that rooftop becoming depressed, I realized that I was living in the past. If I started to become anxious, I knew it was because I was living in the future. I was truly only at peace living in the present.

It was then that I looked to the heavens and thanked the good Lord that he had allowed me to live long enough to see this special moment. I then quietly left the party early, silently chanting to myself like a little schoolkid:

I
couldn’t sleep that night wondering how I was going to tell my friends and family about my diagnosis. I was so worried that no matter what they said, they would be thinking, “Here she goes again…” I didn’t want pity. I most definitely didn’t want to be a burden. What I wanted to say was, “I wish I could tell you this, deliver the news, and at the very same time take away all the worry. I’m still me. I just have a terrible diagnosis, and I wanted to let you know because you’re important to me and I wanted to share it with you.”

One of my persistent thoughts was “Here I am, putting them through this again.” Do you know the “what now?” friend? The phone rings, you look at the number and you think, “Oh boy. What now?” I never envisioned myself being
that friend
. My friends never ever made me feel that way. But that was one of my biggest fears, both when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and then again with MDS. I didn’t want to be the burdensome friend. I wanted to be the fun one. I always pride myself on being the life of the party; good for some laughs. Pollyanna Roberts. I’ve always been an optimistic person. Being optimistic is like a muscle that gets stronger with use. Makes it easier when the tough times arrive. You have to change the way you think in order to change the way you feel.

I called my siblings, Butch, Sally-Ann and Dorothy, and although they were devastated to hear that I was sick again, they really heard me when I said that a cure was on the table. They were also anxious to take the test to see if they might be a match. Telling Mom was much more difficult. She’d been battling her own health issues, and the last year had been hard. She had high blood pressure, arthritis and a heart condition. She’d had a knee replacement that didn’t go well. It was hard to explain to her over the phone that I had this mysterious, rare illness that most people couldn’t spell or really pronounce. I gave Mom the broad strokes—I had a secondary illness to the breast cancer, I was going to bring home swab kits to test Dorothy and Sally-Ann and, most important, the doctors thought that they could cure me. That was all my sweet, eighty-eight-year-old mother needed to know.

Deborah Roberts, my ABC news colleague, Gayle King from CBS, Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s wife) and Theresa Moore (a friend from my ESPN days) started what they call “Robin’s lunch” when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. It was a way for them to keep an eye on me and see for themselves how I was doing. Every few months we still get together to discuss life, our families and just a smidge of the latest gossip. Just the five of us, no one else. Many have tried to invite themselves to join us over the years, but we prefer the intimacy of a small group and the history we share together. The one and only time we broke our rule and let someone else have lunch with us was my mom!

It was at one of our luncheons that I told the group about my MDS diagnosis. Tonya had just gotten emotional talking about how thankful they all were that I was doing well and had survived cancer. It was such a sweet moment that I didn’t want to ruin it by telling them what I was about to face. But I knew it would be difficult for us all to get together again before I went public with the news. So I waited until the end of our lunch and quietly told them. We hugged, we cried and we knew we would always be there for one another.

Though my friends never felt that way—that I was the “what now?” friend—I cannot tell you how many hours I spent in needless worry about being a burden. Oh, gosh, that’s one thing that’s changed in the past year. I know—with my head and my heart—that life is too precious to fritter away so much of it with needless worry.

I remember in 2007 when I called my good friend Jo after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. She and Kim, also one of my closest friends, were very upset.

Jo was crying and I said, “It’s okay, Joey.”

She said, “I just can’t deal with this, Robbie Rob.”

She and Kim call me Robbie Rob.

I tried to calm her down and said again, “It’ll be okay.”

She said, “It’s just too much. I was just talking with my mom and my dad. He is facing a health crisis, too, and now you.”

I listened and expressed my sympathy for her dad.

Then Jo said, “This has been a really bad week for me.”

And I said, “A bad week for you??? Um, yeah, Joey, things have been a little worse for me.”

That made us both laugh because I knew what she meant. It was terrible to hear that your father and your best friend each got a bad diagnosis during the same week. But when I thought of that conversation, I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to call Jo and share this kind of news again.”

But I did. And because they are such amazing friends, Jo and Kim drove down from Maine and met me and Amber at my home in Connecticut. We sat out in the backyard that Saturday night and just spent hours talking and crying. All four of us were big crybabies. I remember Kim was just inconsolable. I was a basket case, too. They were just so angry that I was going through this again. They knew how serious it was the first time, and they just wanted to be able to take on some of it for me.

But the best part of the evening was that there were whole hours when we sat around the fire pit and didn’t say a word. We were together as a group, but they knew I needed silence. That can be very hard for friends. But Jo, Kim and Amber can be with me in the quiet. Sometimes, they would just reach out and touch my hand or squeeze my shoulder. It was like once we’d cried and yelled and raged at the injustice of it all, we decided we’re just going to sit here and be together. We didn’t have to fill the silence with stories of what we did or what we were going to do, although we did that, too. And I think it’s often very hard for close friends to understand that sometimes you want them to be there but you don’t have to say anything, that their presence is as powerful as anything else.

I am a woman of deep faith, but I was angry with God. Why was I being tested again? Why would I have to put my loved ones through this again? Over the course of my struggles, many have asked me if I ever lost faith. Stopped believing. The simple answer is no. I feel it’s okay to get angry with God. He can take it. Just don’t stay angry. It takes courage to believe that the best is yet to come. I hold steadfast to that belief, especially when I come face-to-face with adversity.