by Tom Brokaw
As for me, slowly, my appetite began to return, but I am determined to keep the extra weight off even though the new wardrobe and alterations are not incidental expenses. I try for a hearty oatmeal breakfast and a cocktail of lemonade, orange juice, and cranberry juice to attack the drug-induced dehydration. I can handle a partial cocktail or most of a glass of red wine but no more than that.
Day after day, friends are saying, “How you doing? By the way, you look GREAT!”
Huh? I look better with cancer than I did without?
—
When the news of my condition was broadcast it earned me a new wave of friends and strangers alike who offered physician references and family histories of MM. Once they hear the makeup of my new team their own doctors generally say, “He’s got the right doctors doing the right thing.”
The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis.
I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned.
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease.
Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short.
I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years.
As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.”
Spring
By early April I was feeling stronger than at any time since the diagnosis. Ron Olson, my fellow Mayo board member and the first to know, called on a Saturday evening to get a report and I said, “Best I’ve felt in a long while.”
Sunday morning I awoke feeling “fluie,” an expression favored by Meredith’s doctor father at the onset of flu. By that evening it went from onset to full-blown. I was miserable with congestion, aches in other muscles, swallowing difficulties.
With germ-fighting blood cells on the other team a flu infection can quickly go terminal. So for only the second time in my life I was quickly rolling down a Sloan corridor in a wheelchair, headed for treatment against this potentially perilous condition.
Once again at the check-in: “Tom Brokaw, two six four oh.”
The Sloan urgent care physician in charge asked on entry if I’d had a flu shot. Of course, just last September. “So did I,” she explained, “but I’m just back after eight days out with this strain. I think our flu shots were for last year’s flu.”
There it is again, the body’s constant adaptation to help or hurt us, the vast, intricate systems reacting to whatever enters their spheres of influence.
Scientists in the lab and physicians in their practices are learning more every day about the connectivity of this universe of parts and fluids and still they have untold miles to go, stopping and starting for clinical trials, new imaging devices and investigations into the sources of new, dangerous conditions that pop up every day.
My spacious room quickly became a ward of its own.
Saline solution drips, antibiotics every six hours, teams of internal medicine specialists and their residents, pulmonologists with breathing aids, nurses, and Jennifer, who flew in from Nashville, where she had been for a friend’s fiftieth birthday.
Two nights, three days of intense, round-the-clock care and I was able to return home with the cautionary warning that I seemed to be susceptible to bronchial episodes and it would require close monitoring.
As every hospital visit seemed to, this one turned up another memorable immigrant story. One of the young pulmonologists had an engaging personality so I probed some. He was Chinese.
Medical school? I asked.
He chuckled, “Beijing but also Taipei; I’m Taiwanese but I was educated in Belize.”
What?
He explained that when he was ten his father, the proprietor of a modest Taiwanese restaurant, saw a video promising to teach Chinese kids English in Belize in six months. So the dad sent my new friend to Belize at age ten with his slightly older brother and there they stayed for eight years, learning English and a good deal more.
They returned home on long, circuitous flights for summers and then went back to Belize. Steven Hsu said his parents were what the Chinese call “tiger parents,” very demanding, and he adored them for making him what he is today. When the family restaurant had some economic difficulties he and his wife, a bank analyst, bought his parents a bed and breakfast in Belize.
I think I’ll visit them on my next fishing trip to that tiny English-speaking enclave.
I was dismissed and sent home with medications and breathing aids to temper the bronchial conditions. My bathroom was beginning to resemble a pharmaceutical discount store.
—
When spring arrived I remembered that initial autumn visit to Sloan and the physician who assured me that by spring I would be up and running around. I don’t feel like running around. I’d settle for just one day of feeling great.
The warmer weather and longer sunny days were welcome but they also tried my patience. Walking our dog, Red, in Central Park, I was moving slowly, looking, I’m sure, like an old man out for a stroll before a 5:30 supper at a local diner and an early bedtime. A handsome, athletic couple, probably in their early forties, bounded into the park off Fifth Avenue and began loosening up for a jog.
Fleetingly, I was tempted to say, “Hey, that was me once, I didn’t always look like this.”
Instead I simply continued on my route, trying to put a little more bounce in my shuffle in case they were watching.
Sunday mornings north of Manhattan, in bucolic Westchester County, were especially difficult. Meredith would drive to a Starbucks and get the Sunday papers while I sat in the passenger side, staring out at the string of bicyclists pedaling furiously along the tree-lined streets, past the stately homes with the manicured flower beds now in bloom, and around the reservoirs. That was me a year ago and I so took it for granted that I am now self-critical for not fully appreciating the privilege.
—
The chemo carpet bombing continued and I was fortunate not to have an adverse reaction.
The morning President Obama dedicated the evocative National September 11 Memorial Museum in lower Manhattan I was asked to join Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie for a special Today interruption to cover the event.
“Tom Brokaw, two six four oh.”
I agreed without telling them I would arrange my drug treatment at an earlier time so I could meet their schedule.
&nb
sp; Matt and I had been side by side for the first hours of the 9/11 attacks so it was in a way a continuum and it seemed to go well, as we described the contemporary scene and recalled that dreadful morning, especially the collapse of the towers.
When I am asked about the most challenging stories of my career the attacks of 9/11 are at the top of the breaking news category. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the redefinition of Communist China will be more historically important and transformative.
On that September morning in 2001 I had just finished an exhausting yoga session, my first, when the phone rang. Small plane. World Trade Center. Better come in.
Leaving our apartment I heard the sirens of trucks from our neighborhood firehouse as a caravan of big red outfits headed crosstown to the West Side Highway for the escorted trip to the World Trade Center.
For most of Manhattan, it was otherwise a clear, beautiful morning, election day for a mayoral primary. Running for a cab, I asked a neighbor if he had heard the news. Confused, he said, “The election is not over already, is it?”
Within minutes that confused innocence gave way to a horrific reality. In the cab I heard a well-known radio news reporter describe the second plane flying low over Washington Square Park and into tower number one.
What the hell is going on?
I awoke Meredith in Montana, told her to turn on the television, and said, “I don’t know when we’ll be able to talk again.”
Matt Lauer and Katie Couric were on duty on the Today show set as I slid in beside them, beginning the single most challenging day of my career. This was a monumental event for which we had no warning: men flying hijacked civilian airliners into towering symbols of American wealth and enterprise, television screens filling with eerie images of smoky plumes enveloping the upper floors of the towers, the knowledge that fifty thousand people were at work in those offices when the attack came.
Scattered reports from little-known Middle Eastern organizations claiming credit began to trickle in. Our Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, was working the phones hard, trying to determine how many other airliners might have been hijacked, when we were interrupted by Jim Miklaszewski, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent. He reported a loud boom and a shudder through the building from the west side of the Pentagon. The headquarters of America’s military might had been attacked by another hijacked airliner, American Airlines Flight 77.
Meanwhile, we kept the cameras fixed on the twin towers, the monolithic steel and glass structures reaching 110 stories into the sky from the foot of Wall Street, plumes of smoke and fire billowing out from their high floors. The images were captured on a long-range lens so it was a silent, almost serene scene, utterly misrepresentative of the chaos at ground zero and in the buildings.
How many got safely out?
And how many were forced to jump to escape the fires? Those images began to fleetingly appear—a couple holding hands as they plummeted, a woman fluttering her arms. I am incapable, even now, all these years later, of finding words that do justice to my emotions.
Almost instantly there was an agreement to not televise these desperate scenes.
As the fires continued I said aloud, “There is so much structural damage these towers will have to be brought down,” and instantly regretted my comment. What did I know? Maybe they could survive.
Moments later tower two began its sickening collapse, slow at first and then a rush to a monumental storm of debris and death. We had no idea how many still were trapped inside.
In all the years I’ve been anchoring live events—the start of wars, election nights, inaugurations, natural disasters, space shots and space disasters—there had never been anything like this. A deliberate suicidal attack on two of the tallest office buildings in the world, bringing them down with an unknown number of deaths.
After the second tower collapsed, a slow-motion death spiral, I felt compelled to say on the air, “This will change us in ways we cannot yet anticipate.”
And then, looking steadily into the camera, I declared, “We’re at war.”
Thirteen years later we’re in our third war as a result of rage in the name of Islam, still trying to find a military and political strategy for defeating an uncommon enemy, fueled by a maniacal devotion to destroy Western culture in the name of preserving and expanding a deeply radical view of Islam.
It is a war of great complexity, including Muslim against Muslim, in which the enemy is highly mobile in a forbidding landscape, financed by private, shadowy wealth from within our allies, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
How it ends is unclear. There will be no surrender ceremonies on a U.S. battleship, no new Islamic state constrained by its neighbors and monitored by Western military forces.
How do you conquer the fanatic who answers only to his own distortion of a great and ancient faith?
On all my trips to the region I invariably encounter these kinds of exchanges, in a souk, a coffeehouse, on a street corner. A young Iraqi male will approach and ask, “Are you an American?” Yes. The response? “I love America, but if you harm one hair on my sister’s head I will join jihad against you!” It may be a Shia opposed to Sunni rule, but America’s actions can bind them in common cause.
If only the cancer of Islamic fratricide were subject to the drugs that were my allies in fighting multiple myeloma.
My personal well-being depends on the genius of pharmacologists and other laboratory technicians to develop test-tube weapons for the war raging in my body between cancerous and healthy blood cells. While they are working long hours into the night to advance the quality of human life, Islamic despots pillage, rape, and behead their way across Muhammad’s land in a frenzy of violence right out of the Middle Ages.
—
When the 2014 special report ended thirteen years after the initial attacks I said to Matt, “Well, it’s been a full morning. Ninety minutes ago I was getting pumped through with chemo drugs and from there to this.” He was briefly wide-eyed and then typically solicitous, saying when this is all over we’ll get in some golf.
Because of the spinal issues golf is off the schedule for now, and maybe for a long time.
Before the diagnosis my back pain became so severe during an annual outing with then New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg I had to be driven off the course.
We’re a couple of duffers constantly trying to get better and we have an annual match for a quarter a hole (Bloomberg claims that’s how he became a billionaire). At the time I had to leave the course Mike was up two holes. So now I say, “Rather than lose to the mayor, I developed cancer.”
—
In the spring of 2014 I was sitting at my desk when an email arrived from Jennifer. Brother Bill was failing fast. He could no longer swallow. He developed apnea, a stoppage of breathing, requiring twenty-four-hour monitoring, and he seemed to have just given up, spending most of his time in bed. Jennifer guessed he had a week at best.
She told the hospice nurse, “No heroic measures; his body is signaling his time is up.”
I burst into tears, unexpectedly, because although I knew the moment was coming he’d been my brother for seventy-one years.
Everything that seemed to go right in my life went the other way for Bill and I’ve always had an emotional hangover as a result. Unfairly, how many times did he have a teacher say, “Tom was one of my best,” or, later, “Tom Brokaw’s brother? What’s that like?”
Now we were both sick but I am going to get better and he isn’t.
Through my tears I spotted a crib we had erected in our New York apartment for a visit from Archer, Sarah’s son. Before his steep decline, Uncle Bill had never failed to smile when recalling Sarah’s visit with Archer.
These are the cycles of life. We lose a member of a family and another comes along to renew the continuity, a chain of death and birth that has been under way since the arrival of upright man.
Staring at the crib, remembering Archer’s peaceful nap a short while ago, gave me solace, a
s I hoped it would Bill in some metaphysical way. It reminded me of what Sarah had said earlier, when I was lamenting what an ugly year it had been for the Brokaws.
“Dad!” she said. “Don’t forget, we had Archer. He made it a GREAT year.”
She was right, of course. This precious addition is a tribute to the ever-evolving place and rewards of family.
Bill died a few days later, in the company of Denver friends and his hospice nurse. There were flashes of the old Bill right to the end. He was sleeping most of the time and when he awoke one morning in his final week his nurse said, “You looked happy. Were you dreaming?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Dreaming of what?” she asked.
“Women,” he said with a small smile.
We knew he was ready to let go when he told Jennifer he wanted to see Red, which was the name of our Labrador, named after my father.
Jennifer, thinking he meant the dog, said, “But, Bill, he’s in Montana.”
“No,” he protested. “Red, my dad.”
“He’s in heaven,” Jennifer said. “You want to go there?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
His death was sad but a relief and, in its own way, welcome for all. He was free of this dreadful disease and the family members were free of nagging questions. “Am I doing enough?”
Jennifer need not have asked the question. Her tough love as the daughter he never had was a model. In the midst of all this she wrote an essay for Time magazine in which she argued that the women’s movement needs to address the disproportionate place of women as caregivers in our aging society, too often at the expense of their careers and personal health.
Alzheimer’s is a disease profoundly personal in its arc from normal to mental, physical, and psychological dysfunctional behavior. It is the immediate family that knows best the depth of destruction and pays the price emotionally.
While researchers race to find a cure and entrepreneurs finance the construction of more assisted living facilities, middle-aged children should be expected to look at their aging parents and wonder: “Are we next? If we are, how do we pay for it, handle it emotionally, and what will it do to the quality of our own lives?”
