Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  • • •

  For more than two decades, Sally had been burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. Besides her day job, her government service and other outside commitments, she had also served, or was serving, on the boards of Caltech, Mitre, Apple (briefly), and The Aerospace Corporation, among others. Her contributions to space travel were recognized with honors named for some of the men whose pioneering efforts had made her own ventures possible: the Lindbergh Eagle (1985), the von Braun award (1995). Her excellence in tennis and her work on behalf of women in all sports earned her the NCAA’s Theodore Roosevelt (“Teddy”) award (2005). She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and won the Minerva Award (2006) from her home state. Sally also won the Jefferson Award for public service (1984).

  There were some less demanding gigs, too. In 1999, she made a cameo appearance as herself in TV’s Touched by an Angel, encouraging Sherry Stringfield’s character, a hesitant astronaut, with this promise: “First time you look down on Earth, it will change your perspective on everything.” A few years later she made a TV commercial for Office Depot, a perky fantasy in which she helps a stumped young student identify the First American Woman in Space (by getting his attention—“Psst!”—and pointing conspicuously to herself), then turns down a ride home in the kid’s mom’s car, saying, “I’ll take the shuttle!” In 2003, she swung a bottle of champagne across the bow of a new Carnival Lines cruise ship at Port Canaveral, just down the coast from the Kennedy Space Center. She had earlier christened a Goodyear blimp. In 2009, she participated in a high concept film-and-still shoot for Louis Vuitton with Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin, that took two days during a 30-mile-per-hour windstorm in California’s Simi Valley and required getting tied with a rope to the trunk of a car so she wouldn’t blow away. “Hope they paid you a fortune—and then some,” I emailed her when I saw the photographs by Annie Leibovitz in the magazine ad. She responded a few hours later: “My mortgage is paid for a while. (Ok, quite a while.)” The fee was $200,000. Sally declined the opportunity to appear on TV’s Dancing with the Stars.

  By 2011, most of the outside work was history. As CEO of Sally Ride Science, she was working nonstop and flying high. The company had resulted from a logical, although unplanned, progression: from writing children’s science books, to learning the data revealing how society’s messages to girls and boys affected their participation in scientific careers, to dreaming up the alphabet video game, to launching and running the company. Sally was part of another team, this one of her own creation.

  The accidental astronaut had created her new life—on purpose—and seemed to have the planets aligned. She could draw on her NASA fame when necessary and shop for soy milk without having to sign autographs. She had plenty of money in the bank. Her life with Tam was the one she wanted. In February 2011, Sally Ride Science was looking to expand. The future was as bright as the flames of the rockets that shot her into space.

  13

  *

  A VERY PRIVATE THING

  MARCH 2011–JULY 2012

  Terry McEntee (left) and Karen Flammer celebrate Sally’s sixtieth birthday, May 26, 2011.

  Lynn Sherr: Did you believe Sally was going to make it?

  Bear Ride: Yeah, I did. I always believe Sally, and she believed she’d conquer it. When she went up on the shuttle I said I was nervous. She said she wasn’t, so I said, “Okay.”

  DIAGNOSIS

  Sally was exhausted. “I want to rest,” she told Tam after a meeting, “I don’t feel well.” When Tam noticed the yellow tinge to her skin, she got worried.

  They were in San Francisco for the National Science Teachers Association conference, a major event where Sally Ride Science took its usual booth at the Moscone Center. They were also announcing a partnership for new educational products—a series of science books with activities to explore phenomena like photosynthesis and respiration. That Thursday evening, March 10, 2011, they showered and dressed, then headed to the launch party at a local restaurant, where Sally delivered her remarks to celebrate the deal. A friend leaned over to Tam and whispered that she thought Sally looked very ill. Now alarmed, Tam urged Sally to make a doctor’s appointment for the next day and booked a morning flight back to San Diego. It was the beginning of a sobering new passage for both women that would last more than sixteen months.

  Sally’s internist performed an ultrasound and saw the bad news immediately: a tumor, nearly as big as a golf ball, in her abdomen. He thought it might be pancreatic cancer. A CT scan at the UCSD hospital confirmed it. Sally and Tam watched the screen as the alien image appeared. “And everything went from there,” Tam says.

  They hugged, they cried, they reviewed the medical facts, and they tried to wrap their scientific minds around the numbing incongruity of a terrifying diagnosis. How could Sally, a fitness fanatic who, at fifty-nine, was in better shape than most teenagers, have cancer? How could this woman who had transformed her diet from fried steak and hash browns to roasted salmon with green herbs be facing a life-threatening illness in her gut? It was not self-pity, more an attempt to comprehend the monster that had just ambushed their lives.

  The location of the tumor at the head of the pancreas, and its involvement with the surrounding blood vessels, made it difficult to remove cleanly. The medical term is “borderline resectable.” That meant several months of chemotherapy and radiation, which doctors hoped would shrink the malignancy. It would also give them a chance to observe the behavior of the disease before surgery. Dr. Paul Fanta, who would become Sally’s oncologist at UCSD’s Moores Cancer Center, says pancreatic cancer is as difficult to understand as it is to treat. “It’s so easy on the diagram to show it,” he tells me. “Patients say, ‘Why can’t you just cut it out?’ ” But its proximity to so many critical organs and nerves complicates matters. Even with treatment, Sally’s prognosis was not good. Pancreatic cancer kills 38,000 people a year—out of 45,000 new cases. It is the fourth leading cause of death from cancer, despite being the tenth most commonly diagnosed. The five-year survival percentage for cancer confined to the pancreas is 24 percent; for metastatic disease, it is 2 percent.

  Sally decided to seek a second opinion at the renowned M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Her friend Amy Mickelson, wife of Phil the golfer, had been successfully treated there for breast cancer and set up an appointment. “Sally and I felt like we were zombies in zombie-land,” Tam says. “It’s huge. Our little hospital in San Diego is like this little teeny place, very intimate.” Registering under a pseudonym for confidentiality—Terry (for Terry McEntee) Tsigane (the collie)—Sally spent two days bouncing from doctor to doctor. When she heard the same diagnosis, and the same recommended treatment, and learned that the surgeon she’d already seen was considered one of the best in the world, she headed home and put herself in the hands of the team at UCSD.

  “And once she made the decision,” recalls Dr. Andrew Lowy, director of Surgical Oncology, “she said, ‘Okay, I’ve gotten all the opinions. I want you guys to take care of me. Let’s do it!’ She was as easy a patient as you can get. She was a partner with you, whatever you asked, she was there and ready.”

  TREATMENT

  Sally moved into mission mode. The engineer in her saw a problem to be solved; the scientist, an unknown to be explored. She got out her notebook and made a new set of checklists: “What to expect (1) This week; (2) from chemo; who to call; Dates for blood work.” Her bullet points inventoried the known and the unknowable: “Imodium for diarrhea, Numbness/tingles; Neuro effects; Use creams/lotions; Check IV site daily; Alcohol wipes.”

  Well aware that cancer doesn’t lend itself to logical conclusions, but too well trained not to follow protocol, she and Tam researched the situation as thoroughly as they investigated the possibility of water on Mars. After reading studies linking meat and dairy products to increased health risks, they both became strict vegans. Convinced that a positive attitude and environment might help, they stopped watching TV
news and banished negative thoughts from their conversation. They took up meditation and acupuncture, while Sally continued her regular regime of stretching, flexing and working her muscles, with weights, on the treadmill and jumping rope.

  She would need every bit of strength she could muster. To prepare for her chemo, a port was surgically implanted into a vein in her chest so that toxins could be streamed throughout her body. The first round lasted three months. “It was a pretty tough regimen, the most aggressive chemotherapy we had,” explains Dr. Fanta. Then came twenty-eight days of radiation, targeted directly at the tumor. Sally quizzed the radiologist: “Are you sure you got this right? Do you have the physics right?”

  She got tired, with the bone-wearying fatigue from the chemical barrage on her system. Her mouth grew sensitive to cold, her legs “a little wobbly,” she wrote in her notes. And she lost weight. But she didn’t really get sick or lose her hair. Not yet. Sally and Tam made the best of it, taking picnic lunches to the hospital during her infusions. At home, the enormity of the adversary sometimes overwhelmed them. “We both broke down a lot,” Tam recalls, a catch in her voice. “We would look at each other and say, ‘Okay, how are we going to beat this?’ ”

  The word that counts is we. Sally and Tam grew even closer, recognizing that cancer, like so many cataclysmic events, is more easily tolerated with a partner. What was attacking Sally’s body was also breaking Tam’s heart, and they took every step together. Caregiving creates a level of intimacy beyond romance. They would hardly be apart for the rest of Sally’s life.

  At first, they kept the bad news to themselves. “We needed time to figure things out,” Tam says. “And Sally felt like she had not one ounce more energy to see people or deal with the press, who would get on it. This came first.” The medical team didn’t need to be warned about confidentiality. “It was—it is—a very private thing,” Dr. Fanta tells me.

  But they had a company to run, too, so Tam told a key member of the board, then some others, that Sally had major digestive problems. Enzymes. That’s all. A few months later, Sally and Tam told the truth to Bear, who immediately came to La Jolla with Susan to help during chemo. Along with Tam’s two sisters and her best friend, the only others who were told were SRS cofounders Karen Flammer and Terry McEntee. They were also let in on the secret that they’d always known, that Tam and Sally were a couple. Suddenly the house where few were ever invited became the center of all of their lives. Bear said she and Susan had never been upstairs before, in Sally and Tam’s bedroom.

  Curiously, the new secret wiped out the old, at least for Tam. “I became much less concerned about being gay,” she says. “I was the least homophobic I had ever been my whole life. I would hold Sally’s arm if she needed help out of the car, I would kiss her in front of Bear. I would sit next to her on the couch when Karen and Terry came over for [SRS] Founders’ lunch each week. I could tell Sally was okay with these public affections except that she couldn’t quite relax when I kissed her on the lips in front of Bear.”

  One afternoon, when Sally and Tam were sitting on the white leather couches in their living room drinking tea, just the two of them, they realized that they wanted to formalize their relationship. “I’ve been thinking,” Sally said, “that it might be a good idea to become official with the state of California.” Sally had taken legal steps to insure Tam’s right to inheritance when she wrote her will back in 1992, but wanted to be sure about her estate. And more.

  “We wanted that connection,” Tam says, breaking into tears. “We just wanted to be closer together and stick together any way we could.” They’d missed the five-month window for same-sex marriages in California in 2008, but back then they didn’t think they’d needed it. We know who we are, they’d reasoned. We don’t need a piece of paper to tell us how we feel and what we are to each other. And they hated labels. But that was then, back when life seemed limitless. Now, in the summer of 2011, they decided to register as certified domestic partners, a California legal procedure for which you can download the application from the internet. Tam did so, then mailed it in. “We hated the term—‘domestic partners,’ ” Tam says, “but we liked the notion that it was the closest we could get to saying that we were each other’s lifelong love.” The partnership became official on August 15, and the onionskin certificate arrived in the mail. To celebrate their status as “domestic hens” (their riff on the legalese), Sally went out and bought two brightly colored miniature porcelain hens (maybe one is a rooster) to perch on their shelf.

  And when, at the hospital, she had to fill out forms or answer questions from the medical staff about Tam’s relationship to her, she said, “We’re partners,” or “We’re domestic partners,” just like that. For the first time, Sally could openly say they were a couple.

  She also quietly compiled a playlist for her iPhone with the songs that defined their attachment, the songs they had listened to and danced to over the years, their songs: “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young; “Light in Your Eyes” by Sheryl Crow; “This Is Us” by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris; “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” by U2. Sally titled it “TEO” for Tam Elizabeth O’Shaughnessy, who would not discover it until long after Sally could no longer hear it.

  SURGERY

  By October, the preliminary treatments were completed, and while Sally’s tumor had shrunk only slightly, there were no obvious signs that the disease had progressed. “She was somewhat beat up by the treatment,” Dr. Lowy tells me. “But she was fully functional, walking a lot, and her nutrition was much better. She was certainly healthy enough to have the operation.” Sally had regained some of the weight she lost to the metabolic effect of the cancer cells; she had her hair cut short. She prepared herself for the extensive and exacting surgery known as the Whipple procedure.

  On October 27, 2011, Dr. Lowy, a veteran of more than three hundred such operations, removed part of Sally’s pancreas, bile duct, stomach, transverse mesocolon, superior mesenteric vein and intestine, as well as her gallbladder. Then he reattached the small intestine to her pancreas, bile duct and stomach. It took six hours as the surgeon peeled back and reconstructed layer after layer of organs. There was no visible disease. That was the good news. The bad news was that the disease was more extensive than they’d believed, involving more blood vessels. “It was disappointing,” Dr. Lowy says. “After all that treatment, when you still have disease, it’s not good.” Still, “our hope was, get her to recover, give her other therapy, and keep her in remission for a prolonged period.”

  Tam went into the ICU and hugged and kissed Sally. Bear came too. When Karen Flammer saw her, Sally, just recovering from the anesthesia, waved and whispered, “I had the quickest oxygen recovery!” Flammer laughs. “Of course! That’s her competitiveness!”

  The actual recovery was grueling: ten days in the ICU with constant titration of pain meds. When the nurses seemed confused about the ratios for her dosage, Sally helped them with the math. Going home brought a new set of challenges. Without a section of her pancreas, which provides enzymes for digestion and absorption, she needed special nutritional supplements, streamed into her body from an IV attached to a pole on wheels. Twice a day, she injected herself with blood thinner. Tam became a constant caregiver, flushing the catheter inserted into Sally’s arm, then setting up infusions of the prescribed fluids; pricking Sally’s finger to test for blood sugar before and after meals. She learned to keep the syringes sterile; to recognize the buildup of fluid in Sally’s limbs; and drove her to the ER when something went wrong, invariably, in the middle of the night.

  Sally never complained, just tried to make sense of the lethal, aggressive enemy.

  “She had extraordinary coping skills,” Dr. Fanta says. “And she was so disciplined. She just looked at it as a scientist and tried to understand it.” Occasionally she’d ask him, “Why isn’t this working?” And he’d have to say, “Don’t you understand? We don’t have that control.”

  For most of this
period, Sally continued to work—by phone if necessary. In August, before the surgery, Tam accompanied her on a private jet to Houston for a meeting with executives at AT&T, where Sally was being recruited for the board. Sally was excited about the possibility and still wanted to make a difference. Her lean body had become whisper thin, down to a size 2, then 0, from her normal size 4. But the prospect of the board energized her.

  DECLINE

  By the end of 2011, Sally was showing more effects of both the disease and her ordeal. She was as skinny as a stick, with her salt-and-pepper hair trimmed close to her head. She got a wig. By the time she hung her favorite ornaments onto the Christmas tree—a tiny space shuttle, a moose bearing a tennis racket and the date 1989 (the year she and Tam started living together)—her surgically shrunken stomach prevented her from eating much. Sally abandoned her vegan diet for 1960s comfort food: macaroni and cheese, and Ina Garten’s meatloaf. Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network was a daily TV ritual. When a CT scan in January showed cancer in her bones, Sally started a new round of chemotherapy. There were blood transfusions, more chemo.

  And there were some good days, when Sally actually attended meetings and went out in public. In February, she and Tam traveled to San Francisco, where Sally ran a Women’s Initiative meeting for Deloitte. More than one executive didn’t realize that she was ill.

  In April Sally flew commercially to Salt Lake City, where AT&T formally asked her to join the board. The invitation thrilled her, and she was sure she would be able to accept. In a chipper voicemail to Tam that night, she said she felt good, had eaten some ice cream and was back in her hotel room watching Chopped on the Food Network. “See you tomorrow. Bye!” she said merrily into the phone. It was her first venture on her own in more than a year. She weighed one hundred pounds. Lynn Martin, who’d first suggested Sally to the AT&T board, thought she looked anorexic.