A Lucky Life Interrupted

by Tom Brokaw

  Is that cancer curable or just treatable?

  Memorial Sloan Kettering is on the Upper East Side of New York, a few blocks from the East River, and it is an urban intersection of modern medicine and technology, all directed at the treatment of cancer in its many forms. Walking the corridors of MSK, as Sloan is known to regulars, from one test to another, can be an emotional experience. A young mother, leaning over a gurney, whispering to a bald child, while Dad sits stoically nearby. I thought of our grandchildren and how devastating it would be to have one of them, bald and frightened, on that gurney. The emotional and financial turmoil, the complete immersion of the family in the struggle to find relief, the utter unfairness of it all, adds up to a price no one should have to pay.

  The MSK staff reflects the immigrant roots of New York. A Haitian technician takes my blood. My pain specialist is from India. A native of the Dominican Republic checks my blood pressure and other vital signs. An Argentine MD and her South Korean—American associate survey my veins for a possible stem cell harvest, the extraction of healthy blood to replace the bad cells. An Iranian American physician, trained originally in Tehran, removes some stitches. As the Argentina-born physician put it, “New York is a melting pot; Sloan Kettering is a puree.”

  Quickly I was into the attack on those renegade plasma cells with the daily drug cocktail.

  It is a complex procedure, what to take when, and Meredith instantly became my accountant, enforcer, and quick-study expert, taking detailed notes as the physicians worked their way through the daily routine of a multiple myeloma patient. Dr. Landau outlined her game plan: a twice-daily diet of Revlimid as the primary chemo drug, bone strengtheners, testosterone supplements, calcium, vitamins, and, she said, “We’ll be looking at a stem cell transplant sometime around December. You’ll lose your hair. Is that a problem?” No, but others had warned me that stem cell transplants can be arduous because they require a protracted hospital and home stay in germ-free conditions.

  A friend about the same age was in his fifth year of multiple myeloma drug maintenance and doing well on drugs alone. He elected to pass on a stem cell transplant, explaining that at our age it is a serious interruption when we don’t have an excess of days and months to give up. When I shared his story with Dr. Gertz at Mayo he was dismissive, saying there are no clinical trials demonstrating that drugs are equal to the stem cell procedure, adding that one personal experience is not an acceptable standard.

  Another MM patient, a medical school professor about our age, elected to undergo the transplant and for him it worked surprisingly well. He was hospitalized for ten days and shortly thereafter resumed a robust lifestyle.

  These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or, as many medical experts remind us, it is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.

  Physically, I had almost no trouble with chemo side effects. Fatigue, yes, but an extra nap would neutralize that and I didn’t fight the impulse to crash for a half hour midday. Somewhere along the way I read an article about chemo brain, the cerebral effect of chemo treatments. Ah, I thought, that’s why my spelling skills aren’t consistently accessible and my fact-retrieval synapses aren’t firing in reliable fashion. I’d encounter a long-familiar word and just stare at my misspelling, unable to quickly put it in order (no, it wasn’t the onset of dementia). Spell-check became a close companion. Recalling from memory a name or a title was another long reach, and when I offered “chemo brain” as an excuse my contemporaries would laugh and say, “Hey, I’m not on chemo and I’m in the same place.”

  On these occasions and others when news came of a contemporary’s health issues, the first reaction was generally, “Aging sucks.” Born in 1940, I am not a boomer, but the tailwinds of that generation swept through my age group as well and we became part of the “always young” cohort. Aging was not in the game plan.

  Suddenly I am shuffling along, cane in hand, trying to process all that the medical experts say is going wrong in my body, losing muscle mass and staring at the pillbox of high-powered pharmaceuticals instead of a single-malt Scotch at day’s end.

  It is unsettling to realize just how much control I’ve lost over my body and, by extension, my normal take-charge attitude. Cancer is running my life, and although I am central to the efforts to first slow it and then drive it away, I feel more like a test tube than the man in the cockpit, hands on the controls.

  The uncertainty of it all is an unwelcome companion, and so I control what I can. I am methodical in my daily regimen of drugs and rest, physical therapy and diet. As a lifelong optimist I am confident this will work out, but it is frustrating not to have a more active role than just as an intake system for drugs morning, noon, and night.

  Fall

  Through August, September, and October 2013 I kept up a false front for my friends, who were concerned by my appearance and struggle to walk. Meredith and I worked up a stock answer. “Tom has a bad back, two broken bones from falls while fishing”—mostly true—“but he’s making progress and he’s bored by the subject” (true).

  For a time I used a cane and, in the privacy of our apartment, a walker. My weight dropped precipitously, from close to two hundred to one seventy-five in a month, despite Meredith’s calorie-rich morning shakes, pizza lunches, and protein-rich dinners, and at least one glass of wine nightly. However, I rarely finished a full serving.

  My usually robust appetite faded quickly, mentally and physically. Not much sounded good and it all tasted flat.

  Until this set in, a martini, chilled and straight up, was irresistible. No more.

  That only added to the concern of friends, who know me as an enthusiastic New York foodie. Still, we kept up the cover story. Bad back. Complicated. Going to take a while.

  It was about this time, in early November, that I completed what I thought of as a journey to reality. All my other medical problems in life had a sell-by date. I knew when the broken ankle would heal, the time it would take to knock out a parasite picked up in the Middle East, when a bout with flu would end. Cancer has its own calendar and insidious rhythm. The very word—cancer—has no redeeming qualities. It is a dangerous and mysterious condition. Paul A. Marks, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is one of the world’s leading authorities on cancer, and he’s weary of the attempts to soft-pedal dealing with it. It is not a “mind over matter” disease, nor is it a disease that has succumbed to the declaration of war against it.

  As Marks puts it in a useful, plain-language book entitled On the Cancer Frontier, “The truth, uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, is that medical science has never faced a more inscrutable, more mutable, or more ruthless adversary. It is a unique disease. Cancer is, in a way, the body’s war on itself.”

  Having spent his adult life on the cutting edge of cancer research and treatment, Marks knows whereof he speaks when he says cancers use all of the blood cells’ capabilities to defeat the treatments we throw at them. We can understand the unsettling power of cancer intellectually, but unless it is eating away at our bodies it is something that happens to someone else.

  It was my constant companion, out of sight but never out of mind. Accustomed as I was to having control, I did not welcome the new reality. The Brokaw brio was diluted.

  Several close pals were worried I was hiding something very serious. We were part of the circle of Nora Ephron, the essayist, playwright, screenwriter, director, social arbiter, and den mother for a range of friends uniformly in awe of and in love with her. When she kept her rare form of leukemia secret until the week she died we were at once bereft and acutely conscious of what we don’t know about our closest friends. As I continued my “bad back” story I finally felt compelled to go a small step deeper with a persistent interrogator. “It’s serious but I am not Nora,” I told her.

  I also thought of my friend and competitor Peter Jennings, who developed a persistent cough shortly after I left the an
chor chair of NBC Nightly News. Peter and I first met when we were in our twenties and we remained friends through our respective ascents of the network news routes to the summit, the anchor chair.

  Peter carried with him the élan of a foreign correspondent, which he was for many years in the Middle East and Europe. Dashing and just affected enough to be teased about his ascots, he was The Prince of what came to be known as The Big Three—Peter, Dan Rather, and me. As journalists we had no shortage of work: big stories such as 9/11, the Soviet Union imploding, China changing, wars in Iraq and Bosnia, Silicon Valley, Mandela, Reagan, Iran-contra, President Clinton and Monica, Princess Diana, the contested presidential election of 2000.

  We all arrived in those chairs as working reporters and for the first time in the history of the form we were not anchored in place. Portable satellite stations meant we could go to the story, and so we did.

  God, it was exciting and rewarding, worth the exhaustion and uncertainty of personal schedules. I suppose we all developed an attitude of invulnerability, jumping on and off helicopters and chartered jets, being summoned to the White House for presidential briefings, broadcasting from Desert Storm and Belgrade, Manila and Beijing, Moscow and Prague. So when the news began to leak in April 2005 that Peter might have lung cancer it seemed surreal. Peter? A very heavy smoker once but not for a while. Peter, who liked to call you “lad” and host evenings at Carnegie Hall, seemed somehow above lung cancer.

  Less than four months later he was gone. I still have a hard time processing the swiftness and violence with which his cancer struck. He barely had time to say goodbye.

  As for me, I could not simply disappear. New York is my home and I had unfinished work at NBC to complete. Then I remembered one of the most memorable chance encounters of my life.

  It was April 1982, and I was returning to New York from South Dakota, where we had just buried my father. News of his death from a massive coronary came shortly before I was to begin a new NBC News evening broadcast with Roger Mudd, who had come to us from CBS when Dan Rather was picked to succeed Walter Cronkite. It was a chaotic time as I flew first to California, where Dad had died, and then on to South Dakota, where he would be buried. Now I was headed back to New York to begin the new broadcast.

  At the Minneapolis airport the gate attendant said, “I’m going to put you next to David Niven so others won’t bother him.” As I took my seat I introduced myself and mentioned a mutual friend I knew he had seen recently. For his part, Niven was all you would expect: dashing in his ascot, charming in his manners, and every inch the English gentleman. He explained that he had been at the Mayo Clinic for some tests and then quickly moved on to stories of President Ronald Reagan and their mutual friend William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Odd, I thought, I’m having trouble understanding him, David Niven, the very embodiment of a well-spoken English actor.

  He noticed my confusion and said, “Well, dear boy, I must tell you I was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

  My god, I thought, Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s terminal.

  Just as quickly, Niven said, “Nothing I can do about it so let’s just have a nice chat the rest of the way.” And so we did as I mostly listened to tales of Noël Coward, Gielgud, Vivien Leigh, Olivier, Caine, and Guinness. He was all I could have wanted from David Niven as a chance companion—charming, witty, and self-deprecating, the very characteristics that made him such a star on the big screen.

  As we began our descent into LaGuardia he turned to me and said, “Can we keep my condition between us? I’d rather not have it known.”

  I pledged my secrecy and for the next year, as rumors floated that he was seriously ill, I stayed silent. When he died less than a year after our meeting his son Jamie called and wanted to take me to lunch. It was, he said, a request from his father. “Go find that young man and tell him how much I appreciated that he kept his promise.”

  Now I was dealing with my own secret, and although my condition was not as perilous as Niven’s, I did not want to go on television and have everyone look for signs I had cancer. So Meredith and I kept up the “bad back” explanation, but at home we were dealing with more than a bad back. Multiple myeloma had taken over our lives. The heavy pill regimen twice a day, the search for calorie-rich meals as my appetite and taste buds faded, night sweats, the frustration of a season without end as no one knew for sure when I might get better.

  Through mid-September 2013 I was so immobilized at night I’d have to awaken Meredith to help me relieve myself. She patiently held a hospital container, a plastic quart bottle with a crooked neck in which I urinated. It was all done so slowly and methodically, we gave it a ritualistic name: tai chi pee.

  I experimented with various forms of rolling out of bed with a minimum of pain. One smooth motion, legs first, pushing off the headboard with my left arm and muscling my right arm as an anchor on the other side. On my feet I grabbed the cane and counted five steps to a nearby dresser and then ten more to the bathroom door. Every move had a choreography and a destination.

  When it seemed more than Meredith could handle, one night our son-in-law Charles came over and slept on the living room sofa as a voluntary attendant. We’re close to his parents so it was not surprising the next morning when his mother called to make sure Charles, an accomplished lawyer and wonderful father in his late forties, had been helpful. Whatever their age we never stop being parents to our children.

  By mid-October, gratefully, I was making steady progress. No more cane. I could get in and out of bed unassisted. As my mobility improved I widened my world. I walked a block to a coffee shop for a morning toasted bagel with eggs, cheese, and bacon. With my slower pace and a mindset cleared of almost everything but my health, I noticed that my routine powers of observation were more focused.

  Some of those powers were peevish. That fat guy shuffling along, smoking and listing to one side, he sure as hell doesn’t take care of himself and yet I got the cancer. It was irrational but I needed some kind of venting. Just outside our apartment a bus stop had a life-sized poster of the New England Patriots’ hunky quarterback Tom Brady staring moodily into the camera as he advertised UGG boots. On cold Manhattan days, shuffling cautiously over the icy sidewalks, my back wrenched in pain, I’d look at him and say silently, “F—— you.”

  It was my therapeutic moment.

  (Six months later I met Brady for the first time at the Preakness horse race in Baltimore. He’s even more impressive in person, with his model’s good looks, easy smile, and small posse of jock friends along for the ride. I told him the story of my morning greeting to his poster and drew a big laugh from Tom and his pals. Even as a Giants fan I was so impressed with his good nature I made a winning bet on the Patriots in the Super Bowl against the Seahawks.)

  Slowing from my usual frenetic pace, I became more observant of routine surroundings. In our familiar neighborhood I noticed more detail in the storefronts along Madison Avenue. Stately limestone mansions on Seventy-eighth Street, once the homes of tobacco heiress Doris Duke and others in the very rich class of the early twentieth century, took on fresh form as I paused to ponder the enormous scale and imagine the original occupants rattling around inside.

  One day, slowly walking up Lexington Avenue, a route I had often taken, hurrying from the Seventy-seventh Street subway stop to our apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, I was suddenly aware that coming from the other direction were three couples. They were randomly aligned one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and each seemed to represent distinctive Asian origins. I guessed the first was Korean, the second Vietnamese or Laotian, and the third Chinese.

  In my healthy days I would have blown right by them, but now I spent the next block contemplating how the face of America had changed, even in immigrant-rich New York City, and how I had taken it for granted. On one three-block stretch of Lexington Avenue there are five Asian-owned and -operated cleaning, laundry, and tailoring shops. They are bracketed by a similar number of mani
cure salons, all staffed by South Koreans, Chinese, or other Asians. When we arrived in New York thirty years ago the ethnic mix for these kinds of services included more Greek and Jewish tailors. Manicures were confined to hairstyling shops.

  Our neighborhood has been undergoing a dynamic small-business evolution and I had not noticed, until cancer arrived and forced me to slow down, take it in, and wonder: Thirty years from now, what, then, for this stretch of Lexington Avenue, which is shaking off its gritty, aged façade and replacing it with new energy and possibilities? Will some digital magazine be doing a story on a Korean immigrant who started here as a tailor and became a New York real estate tycoon, with his Harvard Business School graduate children as his partners?

  Now as I walk by their small shops, seeing the proprietors and clerks bent over sewing machines or ironing shirts early and late, I give them a silent salute, knowing their hard work will pay off.

  —

  By November this new life was the norm. I was living with cancer and trying to beat it, or, as I put it in occasional chats with my shaving mirror, “You’ve got cancer. Get used to it.”

  Writing this journal/memoir was helpful. It was a quick and productive link to my life of not so long ago. I also had a commitment to Clear Channel (now called iHeartRadio) for a daily radio commentary called An American Story—think Paul Harvey but not as long, not as resonant, though maybe I’ll get there.

  Our daughter Andrea, as a contractor/consultant for apps with a musical base, is my conduit to the digital generation. During one of her drop-by visits with her West Side New York daughters, Vivian and Charlotte Bird, I enlisted her as an idea source for An American Story so I could keep pace with the new generation. She was invaluable, beginning with the new glossary that goes well beyond LOL. How about A2D—agree to disagree. Or P—parent is watching. PP—parent is no longer watching. I’m looking for shorthand for Parent Doesn’t Have a Clue. Maybe it’s PDHAC.