Fighting for two ... (article from the local newspaper)
There is a very HUGE article that I would like to share with you all. It comes from the local newspaper here. There's a lot to type, so I may not be able to type it all in one setting. You will more than likely have to come back and read & re-read, as I will type & update from the newspaper to the journal here. I have met both Steve and Michelle & they are Extremely nice. They are friends of our good friends. Also, my good friend & a group of her friends are the ones that are putting together the cookbook (the fundraiser cookbook that I have previously mentioned) for Michelle.
Here are a few links:
1). Michelle's Journey
http://www.daytondailynews.com/localnews/content/localnews/0307michelle.html
2). Michelle's Journey: Fighting for Two (see story below) http://www.daytondailynews.com/photo/content/localnews/gallery/0306michelle1.html
Also, here is an address if you'd like to send her a note or card.
ABC 22 / FOX 45
Attn: Michelle Kingsfield
45 Broadcast Plaza
Dayton, Ohio 45408
____________________________________________________________
Michelle's Journey: Fighting for Two
RARE CANCER HAS LOCAL TV ANCHOR IN A BATTLE FOR HER LIFE AND FOR HER UNBORN BABY.
It was right in the middle of the 6'oclock broadcast, and Michelle Kingsfield couldn't turn her head. The pebble-shaped knots that had been popping up in her neck for the past several weeks might as well have been boulders. It hurt to much to move.
'Take out my turns,' she instructed the cameraman. The producer came out of his booth at the commercial break, asking, 'Are you going to make it through this newscast? Because you don't look so good.' The channel 22 co-anchor has been off the air since that Nov. 10 broadcast. Kingsfield and her husband, Steve Edgerley, had been worried about the mass on her neck that had been growing rapidly, pinching her nerves and immobilizing her neck. "Cancer," a nagging voice whispered in Kingsfield's ear. But doctor after doctor suspected nothing worse than a persistent infection or an abcess. She had been on sick leave for eight days before her Nov. 18 appointment with a pathologist. He, too, was reassuring, even to the point of discouraging her from getting a biopsy. 'This doesn't present itself like cancer,' he said.
'We're here, let's do it,' she said.
After a preliminary examination of the biopsy slides, the pathologist all but confirmed his initial impression. I'm 95 percent sure it isn't cancer,' he said. Call tomorrow for the final results, he told her. Kingsfield felt so reassured dhe didn't call. She figured whe would hear the results at her 2:15 appointment that afternoon with her head and neck speacialist, Dr. C. Michael Collins.
'I'm so glad you don't have cancer,' Edgerley said, kissing her goodbye that morning before heading off to his job as a fifth-andsixth-grade teacher.
'Is your husband here today?' Collins asked when she arrived for her appointment, looking discomfited when she said 'No.' He reached out, held her hand, and told her, 'I'm afraid I have some very bad news. The biopsy showed you have a rapidly growing, large-cell lymphoma.'
It would be terrible news for anybody, but Kingsfield had another concern: She was pregnant.
I don't know what it means for the baby,' Collins said.
Nearly hysterical, Kingsfield paged her husband at school. Her ragged sobs made her words almost impossible to hear: 'I have lymphoma!'
'You have glaucoma?' he responded, an Emily Litella moment he later understood as a desire not to hear, not to comprehend.
He rushed to the doctor's office, where he found his wife preoccupied with thoughts of their unborn child. She was all but certain that the baby could not survive a grueling round of chemotherapy. 'When you're pregnant, you don't drink more than a cup of caffeine, you can't eat certain kind of fish.' she told herself. Chemotherapy? Unthinkable.
'My poor baby, my poor baby,' she moaned during the shell-shocked drive home.
Finally, Edgerley blurted the question he had been holding in all along. 'Michelle,' he said, 'What about YOU?'
THE ROLLER COASTER
The mother or the baby? It seemed a Sophie's Choice of modern obstetrics; Kingsfield had never heard of a case of a mother delivering a healthy baby after undergoing chemotherapy.
It was one of many questions for which she had no immediate answer: 'What kind of lymphoma do I have, what kind of chemo will I get? What is my prognosis?'
First she had to undergo a battery of tests: blood work, bone marrow tests, PET scans, biopsies of the two infected lymph nodes.
Until then, the baby was in limbo. The cancer diagnosis was a devastating letdown from the exhilaration of the past few months. In August, after trying for more than a year, the couple had learned that Kingsfield was expecting a sibling for son Casey Robert, 2.
Kingsfield was beaming with her news when we met for one of our regular 'girlfriends lunches' in late October. We became friends the Christmas of 1999, when we were somewhat reluctant performers in a Huber Heights Community Theatre's production of "It's A Wonderful Life." Kingsfield's co-anchor, Mark Pompilio, and K99.1-FM radio host Nancy Wilson lit up the stage; Kingsfield and I bonded over our less-than-scintillating performances.
At the cast party her then-fiance Edgerley came up and gave her a kiss. 'Honey, acting just isn't your thing,' he said, with his trademark combination of candor and offbeat humor.
They met as co-workers at a television station in Joplin, Mo. It was her first job after Kingsfield graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia, fulfilling the prediction of her father, Gary Kingsfield, that the loquacious young daughter he nicknamed 'Mich the Mouth' would go into broadcast journalism.
Kingsfield was dating another man to whom she later became engaged. Edgerley was 12 years her senior with a reputation as a confirmed bachelor. Someone to banter with, to pal around with, but certainly not a romantic interest.
She saw another side of him when they worked together on Joplin's Muscular Dystrophy Telethon in 1993, which Edgerley had emceed for nearly a decade. 'He was so caring and compassionate, and he had such a strong relationship with these families,' she said. Still, Steve Edgerley was the last thing on her mind when she called off her engagement three weeks before the wedding. Even though she was so far along 'The Wedding Path' - florist, caterers, invitations mailed out - something didn't feel right.
Kingsfield blurted the news to a co-worker and then raced into the bathroom to cry. The co-worker was in on Edgerley's secret: Now working at another TV station in Fort Myers, Fla., Edgerley was so smitten with Kingsfield he had tacked her wedding invitation on his refrigerator, not having the heart to respond.
His former co-worker immediately called Edgerley with the news of the broken engagement. 'The Eagle has landed,' he reported.
Edgerley called that very night. 'I was simply a 'concerned friend,'" he said, grinning wickedly.
It wasn't long before Kingsfield booked a flight to Fort Myers. Edgerley hugged her when she got off the plane and she thought, 'Hmmmm...that feels nice.' They walked a ways, and then he dropped their bags and hugged her long and hard. 'Hmmm,' she thought, 'this is It.'
They married July 15, 2000, in her hometown of St. Louis; Casey was born June 29, 2002. 'A beautiful delivery,' Kingsfield said.
And now this.
The afternoon of the diagnosis, they retreated to their bedroom and hugged and talked and cried. The take-charge Kingsfield, seldom at a loss, cried out, 'What am I going to do?' and 'I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Casey isn't even going to remember me.'
Those words reverberated in Edgerley's mind for days. He could hardly bear to look at his son.
In the midst of their grieving, they received an uncharacteristic mid-afternoon call from Steve's sister in New York, Susan Edgerley. She was the first family member to whom they broke the news. 'You're in such a cloud,' she recalled. 'You think think you're going to wake up from a bad dream. And then the words come out of your mouth, and it makes it real.'
Edgerley will never forget the moment when devastation turned into determination. "
It couldn't have been much more than an hour of talking and crying,' he said, 'before she walked downstairs and announced, 'We're going to kick some butt.'"
The reporter in her wanted answers NOW; but for many questions, particularly the fate of the baby, she would have to wait.
It was the beginning of what Edgerley calls the 'roller coaster,' the wild swings of good news and bad news that characterized the early weeks of the cancer diagnosis.
The following Monday, they learned she had anaplastic large-cell non-Hodkins lymphoma, which occurs only in 2 percent of lymphoma patients.
Kingsfield and her sister, Cheryl Neal - who had flown in from New Jersey to offer moral support - spen the weekend researching the different kinds of lymphoma on the Internet. They hoped her diagnosis would be anaplastic large-cell because it responds rapidly to chemotherapy. It's cosidered curable, not merely treatable - an important distinction for a 35 year old patient.
The bone marrow biopsy showed no bone involvement, drmatically improving her prognosis. The roller coaster went up, up, up.
But a PET scan, an imaging test that shows stages of cancer, revelaed 'hot spots,' suggestion the likelihood of light bone involvement. That made her lymphoma a stage 4 cancer and refuced her prognosis to a 30 percent chance of survival.
The roller coaster came crashing down. 'How do you not wake up every day thinking you're going to die?' Kingsfield asked herself.
Her husband responded with the support and optimism she had always counted on. 'Thirty percent?' he said. 'That's all we need.'
On Dec.1, they flew to Boston for a consultation with a nationally known oncologist, Dr. Georger Canellos, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For the first time, all the test would be assembled in one place.
Before they met with the doctor, Steve's sister-in-law brought in seven friends from her prayer group. "In that prayer group, I felt, for the first time, a sense of peace, a sense that God is with you," Kingsfield recalled. 'I was prepared for whatever the doctor would say.'
After reviewing her blood work, and assessing Kingsfield's general health and fitness level, Canellos gave her a much more favorable prognosis: A 70 percent chance of survival.
'I'll take three out of four,' she told her husband. Mr. Optimist had to admit it: He liked those odds better, too.
She couldn't wait to start her first chemotherapy the next day. 'I'm seeing daily in my body how this cancer is taking over, and I wanted to get something in my body to fight it,' she said. 'Now this cancer has some competition.'
That night in bed, she began what would become a chemotherapy ritual: She pictured the drugs as red boxing gloves, punching the cancer cells. 'By the time I fell asleep, there were none left,' she said. Within days, the swelling on her neck was all but gone - a dramatic affirmation that the chemotherapy was working. 'It's one of the most astounding remissions I've ever seen,' said her oncologist, Dr. Mark Romer.
She was winning the first round, but what about the baby?
THE MIRACLE BABY
In the days following her cancer diagnosis, Kingsfield had nearly given up hope for the baby's survival. She came close to indulging in a glass of wine at Thanksgiving, thinking, 'This babhy isn't going to make it anyway. But I just couldn't do it.'
It was Romer who provided the first ray of hope. It's possible, he said, that the baby could survive chemotherapy without interfering with the mother's ability to fight her cancer.
Consultation with a specialist confirmed those hopes. Kingsfield would be among a small study group of women-fewer than 200-who have been pregnant while undergoing an aggressive form of chemotherapy known as CHOP therapy, a ptent blend of the drugs cytoxan, adriamycin, oncovin and prednazone. No side effects had been detected in any of the children duringan 11-year study period.
Kingsfield still faced increased risks of low-birth weight or delivering prematurely, but those were risks she was willing to take. 'You can't decide not to do something simply because it's difficult,' she said, in announcing her decision to her mother, Joyce Skaggs of St. Lois.
The mother or the baby? Kingsfield learned that, for many pregnant women with cancer, the choice didn'[t have to be either/or. 'There's a lot of misinformation out there, and Michelle initially got a lot of negative information about the chemo affecting her chance for a cure,' Romer said. 'You can take some types of chemo and it will not cause birth defects and it will not reduce chance of cure.'
She couldn't do anything to jeopardize her survival; she needed to be there for Casey, for Steve. 'I'm so glad I never had to make that choice,' she said. 'It bothered me for a long time.'
She is about to enter her 31st week of pregnancy with what she calls her miracle baby. She believes the pregnancy caused her cancer symptoms to present themselves earlier, and more painfully. (Anaplastic Large-cell lymphoma is characterized by a painless swelling in the neck.) 'I think the timing is incredible. Had the diagnosis been made even a few weeks earlier - in the first trimester - the outcome for the pregnancy would have been totally different. And ha I ben diagnosed later, my prognosis might have been completely different. It's an example of God taking care me and the baby.'
The pregnancy has made her treatment more difficult, emotionally and physically. Recovery from the chemo is a little harder, a little longer, the side effects more intense. An irritated colon, for instance, is more painful with the baby's weight pressing against it.
She has finished five of her six chemotherapy sessions; the last is scheduled for March 17, allowing for enough time for the chemo to get out of her system before the baby is born.
The second chemotherapy, two days before Christmas, proved to be the worst, sending her to Miami Valley Hospital on New Year's Day with exhaustion and dehydration. In her Dec. 28 diary entry, she wrote, 'The doctors told me, 'Chemotherapy will make you tired.' That was the understatement of the year. But how do you explain a fatigue that drains you to the point where you're so tired the thought of getting out of bed to go to the baythroom is just too much?'
Edgerley remembers that as the low point: 'She didn't have the energy to cry. I looked at her and saw one small tear frozen on her cheek.'
At that moment, he told her, 'I've never loved you as much as I do right now.'
In the early days after her diagnosis, he recalled, they were back to their 'first-date manners'.
Added Kingsfield: 'Your relationshsip with your husband totally changes. When you're faced with the threat of someone being taken away, you realize how much you love them and how much they love you.'
But cancer puts strains on a marriage even as it strengthens the bond. Michelle worries that Steve is doing too much, and that nobody's attending to his needs: 'If he has a bad day at work, I can always trup that.'
Steve fears taht he ins't doing enough: 'Michelle is so tough, so resilient, I forget that she needs help.'
Typically, she feels exhausted and depleted for nearly two weeks after the chemotherapy; then she experiences a week of relative strength before it starts all over again. But the baby seems to be on track, in terms of weight and development, although the likelihood remains high that she could deliver before her May 10 due date.
Feeling the need for some happy surprises in her life, she doesn't want to know the baby's sex. 'It's a girl,' she jokes with Romer, 'because girls are tough.'
'It's a girl,' he jokes back, 'because girls take care of their moms.'
Her viewers have mailed get-well cards by the truckload; the couple started counting after 400, and gave up all home of responding to them all. But she is keeping every one of them. Every night, before bedtime, she and Steve read a few letters, many of them from cancer survivors, all of them wishing her well. 'They're so thoughtful and sincere,' she said. 'It's nice to go to sleep with pleasant thoughts.'
She brings the letters with her, for company, when she undergoes her chemotherapy. 'Day out and day in you do the news, and you wonder, 'Do I even make a difference? If I leave town, would anyone notice?' I must make a difference. The way they write these letters, people feel like they know me, they're comfortable with me.'
After the baby's birth, a PET scan will be done to determine if all the cancer has gone. If that test shows she's in remission, she'll go back on the air sometime after her maternity leave. When she does, she'll no longer be facing the camera, speaking to an anonymous audience: 'I'll be talking to all those people who wrote me letters.'
DEALING WITH CANCER
She's mindful of the power of her medium, and how she can use it to educate people about cancer. So she knew what she had to do when her friend and co-anchor, Mark Pompilio, asked her to take off her wig for last week's two-part segment, Michelle's Journey.
She did it without hesitation, even though she knows she's in a business where "there's so much scrutiny on everything from your hair to your makeup to your clothes."
"This is me," she said. "This is the reality."
She also did it because she wants other cancer patients to know that it's not the end of the world if you lose your hair. "It doens't define who you are," she said. "Take a look at the courage you've shown, your struggles and how you've overcome them."
There are days when she sees another woman's beautiful, shiny hair and feels wistful. Days when she looks in the mirror and almost frightens herself, her nearly bald head a stark reminder that she has cancer. Days when she feels unattractvie and her husband reassures her, "You're beautiful, you're adorable, you've got just the right face for it."
In her journal she wrote, "The first time I put ona wig I flet very sad. This isn't me. It doesn't look like me. You can tell this is a wig. I began learning quickly about machine-sewn versus hand done. Some aren't adjustable and could fly off in a strong wind. I knew I didn't want that. I have enough to worry about, right?"
The loss of her hair, she understands now, isn't "the big picture."
Here's the big picture: Getting cured so she can be there to raise her children, to grow old with her husband. Even if the PET scan shows her to be cancerfree, there is a one-in-four chance of recurrence.
"In my heart I feel like it's all going to be OK, that when we get this scan, I believe it will be cancer-free," she said. "Then another part of me asks, 'Am I being positive because that's what I'm supposed to do?'"
Added Edgerley, "We're looking for a healthy baby and for Michelle to be cured. In my gut I think that's what's going to happen. But it's not a done deal. We need to be ready, we need to be prepared."
Kingsfield and I met for one of our girlfriends lunches on one of her good days, increasingly rare as the pregnancy progresses and the chemotherapy takes a cumulative toll. "Cancer isn't all bad, you know," she says, shooting me a sideways glance, as if anticipating my surprised look.
It's not that she'd wish this on anyone. But, at 35, she has learned some things that might have taken much longer. "I used to be a Supermom," she said. "It used to be like, 'Look at me, I can do it all.' Now the job is gone, I can't do all the things my son asks me to, which is hard."
When Casey gets a cold, Kingsfield can't hug or kiss him for a week.
"Mommy can't get get sick," she explains.
There are days when she tells herself, "I'm so useless, I can't do anything. And her I was a person who was busy from the minute I got up to the minute I went to bed."
So she has been forced to shift her thinking. Perhaps your identity, she reflects, isn't so centered around what you do as around who you are.
"At some moment any cancer patient and any cancer survivor needs to look deep inside themselves and pull out some inner strength" she said. "You need to find something, whether that's faith or focusing on family and kids. I have more faith than I thought I had, more faith in God and in Steve and in Casey."
When you have cancer, she said, "You realize how many people you have in your life who care about you."
She learned she has co-workers and neighbors who will organize a "Meals for Michelle" program to bring in regular meals. Her neighbors are putting together a cookbook, REPORTING THE LOCAL MEALS, with the proceeds going to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Socieity.
"I have so many people praying for me," she said. "I can picture God saying, 'Enough about Michelle already, I know about Michelle.'"
None of that would be enough without her family. She has a husband who looks at her at her very sickest and says, "I've never loved you as much as I do now."
She has a son who makes her laugh when she's feeling her lowest. After her last chemotherapy, Casey brought out his doctor bag, gave her a shot and counseled, "This won't hurt Mommy. It will make you laugh."
Most of all, she has a companion on her journey, someone who makes her fell less alone.
"The baby seems to know when I'm sad," she said, patting her stomach.
It will give me a little kick and remind me how blessed I am and how lucky I am to have this buddy helping me through this."
yAy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tHIS is the end of the article!! No more typing and time for me to move on and FINALLY update my journal! UPDATED ON: sUNDAY, March 26 2005 @ 5:45 E.S.T..
Here are a few links:
1). Michelle's Journey
http://www.daytondailynews.com/localnews/content/localnews/0307michelle.html
2). Michelle's Journey: Fighting for Two (see story below) http://www.daytondailynews.com/photo/content/localnews/gallery/0306michelle1.html
Also, here is an address if you'd like to send her a note or card.
ABC 22 / FOX 45
Attn: Michelle Kingsfield
45 Broadcast Plaza
Dayton, Ohio 45408
____________________________________________________________
Michelle's Journey: Fighting for Two
RARE CANCER HAS LOCAL TV ANCHOR IN A BATTLE FOR HER LIFE AND FOR HER UNBORN BABY.
It was right in the middle of the 6'oclock broadcast, and Michelle Kingsfield couldn't turn her head. The pebble-shaped knots that had been popping up in her neck for the past several weeks might as well have been boulders. It hurt to much to move.
'Take out my turns,' she instructed the cameraman. The producer came out of his booth at the commercial break, asking, 'Are you going to make it through this newscast? Because you don't look so good.' The channel 22 co-anchor has been off the air since that Nov. 10 broadcast. Kingsfield and her husband, Steve Edgerley, had been worried about the mass on her neck that had been growing rapidly, pinching her nerves and immobilizing her neck. "Cancer," a nagging voice whispered in Kingsfield's ear. But doctor after doctor suspected nothing worse than a persistent infection or an abcess. She had been on sick leave for eight days before her Nov. 18 appointment with a pathologist. He, too, was reassuring, even to the point of discouraging her from getting a biopsy. 'This doesn't present itself like cancer,' he said.
'We're here, let's do it,' she said.
After a preliminary examination of the biopsy slides, the pathologist all but confirmed his initial impression. I'm 95 percent sure it isn't cancer,' he said. Call tomorrow for the final results, he told her. Kingsfield felt so reassured dhe didn't call. She figured whe would hear the results at her 2:15 appointment that afternoon with her head and neck speacialist, Dr. C. Michael Collins.
'I'm so glad you don't have cancer,' Edgerley said, kissing her goodbye that morning before heading off to his job as a fifth-andsixth-grade teacher.
'Is your husband here today?' Collins asked when she arrived for her appointment, looking discomfited when she said 'No.' He reached out, held her hand, and told her, 'I'm afraid I have some very bad news. The biopsy showed you have a rapidly growing, large-cell lymphoma.'
It would be terrible news for anybody, but Kingsfield had another concern: She was pregnant.
I don't know what it means for the baby,' Collins said.
Nearly hysterical, Kingsfield paged her husband at school. Her ragged sobs made her words almost impossible to hear: 'I have lymphoma!'
'You have glaucoma?' he responded, an Emily Litella moment he later understood as a desire not to hear, not to comprehend.
He rushed to the doctor's office, where he found his wife preoccupied with thoughts of their unborn child. She was all but certain that the baby could not survive a grueling round of chemotherapy. 'When you're pregnant, you don't drink more than a cup of caffeine, you can't eat certain kind of fish.' she told herself. Chemotherapy? Unthinkable.
'My poor baby, my poor baby,' she moaned during the shell-shocked drive home.
Finally, Edgerley blurted the question he had been holding in all along. 'Michelle,' he said, 'What about YOU?'
THE ROLLER COASTER
The mother or the baby? It seemed a Sophie's Choice of modern obstetrics; Kingsfield had never heard of a case of a mother delivering a healthy baby after undergoing chemotherapy.
It was one of many questions for which she had no immediate answer: 'What kind of lymphoma do I have, what kind of chemo will I get? What is my prognosis?'
First she had to undergo a battery of tests: blood work, bone marrow tests, PET scans, biopsies of the two infected lymph nodes.
Until then, the baby was in limbo. The cancer diagnosis was a devastating letdown from the exhilaration of the past few months. In August, after trying for more than a year, the couple had learned that Kingsfield was expecting a sibling for son Casey Robert, 2.
Kingsfield was beaming with her news when we met for one of our regular 'girlfriends lunches' in late October. We became friends the Christmas of 1999, when we were somewhat reluctant performers in a Huber Heights Community Theatre's production of "It's A Wonderful Life." Kingsfield's co-anchor, Mark Pompilio, and K99.1-FM radio host Nancy Wilson lit up the stage; Kingsfield and I bonded over our less-than-scintillating performances.
At the cast party her then-fiance Edgerley came up and gave her a kiss. 'Honey, acting just isn't your thing,' he said, with his trademark combination of candor and offbeat humor.
They met as co-workers at a television station in Joplin, Mo. It was her first job after Kingsfield graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia, fulfilling the prediction of her father, Gary Kingsfield, that the loquacious young daughter he nicknamed 'Mich the Mouth' would go into broadcast journalism.
Kingsfield was dating another man to whom she later became engaged. Edgerley was 12 years her senior with a reputation as a confirmed bachelor. Someone to banter with, to pal around with, but certainly not a romantic interest.
She saw another side of him when they worked together on Joplin's Muscular Dystrophy Telethon in 1993, which Edgerley had emceed for nearly a decade. 'He was so caring and compassionate, and he had such a strong relationship with these families,' she said. Still, Steve Edgerley was the last thing on her mind when she called off her engagement three weeks before the wedding. Even though she was so far along 'The Wedding Path' - florist, caterers, invitations mailed out - something didn't feel right.
Kingsfield blurted the news to a co-worker and then raced into the bathroom to cry. The co-worker was in on Edgerley's secret: Now working at another TV station in Fort Myers, Fla., Edgerley was so smitten with Kingsfield he had tacked her wedding invitation on his refrigerator, not having the heart to respond.
His former co-worker immediately called Edgerley with the news of the broken engagement. 'The Eagle has landed,' he reported.
Edgerley called that very night. 'I was simply a 'concerned friend,'" he said, grinning wickedly.
It wasn't long before Kingsfield booked a flight to Fort Myers. Edgerley hugged her when she got off the plane and she thought, 'Hmmmm...that feels nice.' They walked a ways, and then he dropped their bags and hugged her long and hard. 'Hmmm,' she thought, 'this is It.'
They married July 15, 2000, in her hometown of St. Louis; Casey was born June 29, 2002. 'A beautiful delivery,' Kingsfield said.
And now this.
The afternoon of the diagnosis, they retreated to their bedroom and hugged and talked and cried. The take-charge Kingsfield, seldom at a loss, cried out, 'What am I going to do?' and 'I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Casey isn't even going to remember me.'
Those words reverberated in Edgerley's mind for days. He could hardly bear to look at his son.
In the midst of their grieving, they received an uncharacteristic mid-afternoon call from Steve's sister in New York, Susan Edgerley. She was the first family member to whom they broke the news. 'You're in such a cloud,' she recalled. 'You think think you're going to wake up from a bad dream. And then the words come out of your mouth, and it makes it real.'
Edgerley will never forget the moment when devastation turned into determination. "
It couldn't have been much more than an hour of talking and crying,' he said, 'before she walked downstairs and announced, 'We're going to kick some butt.'"
The reporter in her wanted answers NOW; but for many questions, particularly the fate of the baby, she would have to wait.
It was the beginning of what Edgerley calls the 'roller coaster,' the wild swings of good news and bad news that characterized the early weeks of the cancer diagnosis.
The following Monday, they learned she had anaplastic large-cell non-Hodkins lymphoma, which occurs only in 2 percent of lymphoma patients.
Kingsfield and her sister, Cheryl Neal - who had flown in from New Jersey to offer moral support - spen the weekend researching the different kinds of lymphoma on the Internet. They hoped her diagnosis would be anaplastic large-cell because it responds rapidly to chemotherapy. It's cosidered curable, not merely treatable - an important distinction for a 35 year old patient.
The bone marrow biopsy showed no bone involvement, drmatically improving her prognosis. The roller coaster went up, up, up.
But a PET scan, an imaging test that shows stages of cancer, revelaed 'hot spots,' suggestion the likelihood of light bone involvement. That made her lymphoma a stage 4 cancer and refuced her prognosis to a 30 percent chance of survival.
The roller coaster came crashing down. 'How do you not wake up every day thinking you're going to die?' Kingsfield asked herself.
Her husband responded with the support and optimism she had always counted on. 'Thirty percent?' he said. 'That's all we need.'
On Dec.1, they flew to Boston for a consultation with a nationally known oncologist, Dr. Georger Canellos, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For the first time, all the test would be assembled in one place.
Before they met with the doctor, Steve's sister-in-law brought in seven friends from her prayer group. "In that prayer group, I felt, for the first time, a sense of peace, a sense that God is with you," Kingsfield recalled. 'I was prepared for whatever the doctor would say.'
After reviewing her blood work, and assessing Kingsfield's general health and fitness level, Canellos gave her a much more favorable prognosis: A 70 percent chance of survival.
'I'll take three out of four,' she told her husband. Mr. Optimist had to admit it: He liked those odds better, too.
She couldn't wait to start her first chemotherapy the next day. 'I'm seeing daily in my body how this cancer is taking over, and I wanted to get something in my body to fight it,' she said. 'Now this cancer has some competition.'
That night in bed, she began what would become a chemotherapy ritual: She pictured the drugs as red boxing gloves, punching the cancer cells. 'By the time I fell asleep, there were none left,' she said. Within days, the swelling on her neck was all but gone - a dramatic affirmation that the chemotherapy was working. 'It's one of the most astounding remissions I've ever seen,' said her oncologist, Dr. Mark Romer.
She was winning the first round, but what about the baby?
THE MIRACLE BABY
In the days following her cancer diagnosis, Kingsfield had nearly given up hope for the baby's survival. She came close to indulging in a glass of wine at Thanksgiving, thinking, 'This babhy isn't going to make it anyway. But I just couldn't do it.'
It was Romer who provided the first ray of hope. It's possible, he said, that the baby could survive chemotherapy without interfering with the mother's ability to fight her cancer.
Consultation with a specialist confirmed those hopes. Kingsfield would be among a small study group of women-fewer than 200-who have been pregnant while undergoing an aggressive form of chemotherapy known as CHOP therapy, a ptent blend of the drugs cytoxan, adriamycin, oncovin and prednazone. No side effects had been detected in any of the children duringan 11-year study period.
Kingsfield still faced increased risks of low-birth weight or delivering prematurely, but those were risks she was willing to take. 'You can't decide not to do something simply because it's difficult,' she said, in announcing her decision to her mother, Joyce Skaggs of St. Lois.
The mother or the baby? Kingsfield learned that, for many pregnant women with cancer, the choice didn'[t have to be either/or. 'There's a lot of misinformation out there, and Michelle initially got a lot of negative information about the chemo affecting her chance for a cure,' Romer said. 'You can take some types of chemo and it will not cause birth defects and it will not reduce chance of cure.'
She couldn't do anything to jeopardize her survival; she needed to be there for Casey, for Steve. 'I'm so glad I never had to make that choice,' she said. 'It bothered me for a long time.'
She is about to enter her 31st week of pregnancy with what she calls her miracle baby. She believes the pregnancy caused her cancer symptoms to present themselves earlier, and more painfully. (Anaplastic Large-cell lymphoma is characterized by a painless swelling in the neck.) 'I think the timing is incredible. Had the diagnosis been made even a few weeks earlier - in the first trimester - the outcome for the pregnancy would have been totally different. And ha I ben diagnosed later, my prognosis might have been completely different. It's an example of God taking care me and the baby.'
The pregnancy has made her treatment more difficult, emotionally and physically. Recovery from the chemo is a little harder, a little longer, the side effects more intense. An irritated colon, for instance, is more painful with the baby's weight pressing against it.
She has finished five of her six chemotherapy sessions; the last is scheduled for March 17, allowing for enough time for the chemo to get out of her system before the baby is born.
The second chemotherapy, two days before Christmas, proved to be the worst, sending her to Miami Valley Hospital on New Year's Day with exhaustion and dehydration. In her Dec. 28 diary entry, she wrote, 'The doctors told me, 'Chemotherapy will make you tired.' That was the understatement of the year. But how do you explain a fatigue that drains you to the point where you're so tired the thought of getting out of bed to go to the baythroom is just too much?'
Edgerley remembers that as the low point: 'She didn't have the energy to cry. I looked at her and saw one small tear frozen on her cheek.'
At that moment, he told her, 'I've never loved you as much as I do right now.'
In the early days after her diagnosis, he recalled, they were back to their 'first-date manners'.
Added Kingsfield: 'Your relationshsip with your husband totally changes. When you're faced with the threat of someone being taken away, you realize how much you love them and how much they love you.'
But cancer puts strains on a marriage even as it strengthens the bond. Michelle worries that Steve is doing too much, and that nobody's attending to his needs: 'If he has a bad day at work, I can always trup that.'
Steve fears taht he ins't doing enough: 'Michelle is so tough, so resilient, I forget that she needs help.'
Typically, she feels exhausted and depleted for nearly two weeks after the chemotherapy; then she experiences a week of relative strength before it starts all over again. But the baby seems to be on track, in terms of weight and development, although the likelihood remains high that she could deliver before her May 10 due date.
Feeling the need for some happy surprises in her life, she doesn't want to know the baby's sex. 'It's a girl,' she jokes with Romer, 'because girls are tough.'
'It's a girl,' he jokes back, 'because girls take care of their moms.'
Her viewers have mailed get-well cards by the truckload; the couple started counting after 400, and gave up all home of responding to them all. But she is keeping every one of them. Every night, before bedtime, she and Steve read a few letters, many of them from cancer survivors, all of them wishing her well. 'They're so thoughtful and sincere,' she said. 'It's nice to go to sleep with pleasant thoughts.'
She brings the letters with her, for company, when she undergoes her chemotherapy. 'Day out and day in you do the news, and you wonder, 'Do I even make a difference? If I leave town, would anyone notice?' I must make a difference. The way they write these letters, people feel like they know me, they're comfortable with me.'
After the baby's birth, a PET scan will be done to determine if all the cancer has gone. If that test shows she's in remission, she'll go back on the air sometime after her maternity leave. When she does, she'll no longer be facing the camera, speaking to an anonymous audience: 'I'll be talking to all those people who wrote me letters.'
DEALING WITH CANCER
She's mindful of the power of her medium, and how she can use it to educate people about cancer. So she knew what she had to do when her friend and co-anchor, Mark Pompilio, asked her to take off her wig for last week's two-part segment, Michelle's Journey.
She did it without hesitation, even though she knows she's in a business where "there's so much scrutiny on everything from your hair to your makeup to your clothes."
"This is me," she said. "This is the reality."
She also did it because she wants other cancer patients to know that it's not the end of the world if you lose your hair. "It doens't define who you are," she said. "Take a look at the courage you've shown, your struggles and how you've overcome them."
There are days when she sees another woman's beautiful, shiny hair and feels wistful. Days when she looks in the mirror and almost frightens herself, her nearly bald head a stark reminder that she has cancer. Days when she feels unattractvie and her husband reassures her, "You're beautiful, you're adorable, you've got just the right face for it."
In her journal she wrote, "The first time I put ona wig I flet very sad. This isn't me. It doesn't look like me. You can tell this is a wig. I began learning quickly about machine-sewn versus hand done. Some aren't adjustable and could fly off in a strong wind. I knew I didn't want that. I have enough to worry about, right?"
The loss of her hair, she understands now, isn't "the big picture."
Here's the big picture: Getting cured so she can be there to raise her children, to grow old with her husband. Even if the PET scan shows her to be cancerfree, there is a one-in-four chance of recurrence.
"In my heart I feel like it's all going to be OK, that when we get this scan, I believe it will be cancer-free," she said. "Then another part of me asks, 'Am I being positive because that's what I'm supposed to do?'"
Added Edgerley, "We're looking for a healthy baby and for Michelle to be cured. In my gut I think that's what's going to happen. But it's not a done deal. We need to be ready, we need to be prepared."
Kingsfield and I met for one of our girlfriends lunches on one of her good days, increasingly rare as the pregnancy progresses and the chemotherapy takes a cumulative toll. "Cancer isn't all bad, you know," she says, shooting me a sideways glance, as if anticipating my surprised look.
It's not that she'd wish this on anyone. But, at 35, she has learned some things that might have taken much longer. "I used to be a Supermom," she said. "It used to be like, 'Look at me, I can do it all.' Now the job is gone, I can't do all the things my son asks me to, which is hard."
When Casey gets a cold, Kingsfield can't hug or kiss him for a week.
"Mommy can't get get sick," she explains.
There are days when she tells herself, "I'm so useless, I can't do anything. And her I was a person who was busy from the minute I got up to the minute I went to bed."
So she has been forced to shift her thinking. Perhaps your identity, she reflects, isn't so centered around what you do as around who you are.
"At some moment any cancer patient and any cancer survivor needs to look deep inside themselves and pull out some inner strength" she said. "You need to find something, whether that's faith or focusing on family and kids. I have more faith than I thought I had, more faith in God and in Steve and in Casey."
When you have cancer, she said, "You realize how many people you have in your life who care about you."
She learned she has co-workers and neighbors who will organize a "Meals for Michelle" program to bring in regular meals. Her neighbors are putting together a cookbook, REPORTING THE LOCAL MEALS, with the proceeds going to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Socieity.
"I have so many people praying for me," she said. "I can picture God saying, 'Enough about Michelle already, I know about Michelle.'"
None of that would be enough without her family. She has a husband who looks at her at her very sickest and says, "I've never loved you as much as I do now."
She has a son who makes her laugh when she's feeling her lowest. After her last chemotherapy, Casey brought out his doctor bag, gave her a shot and counseled, "This won't hurt Mommy. It will make you laugh."
Most of all, she has a companion on her journey, someone who makes her fell less alone.
"The baby seems to know when I'm sad," she said, patting her stomach.
It will give me a little kick and remind me how blessed I am and how lucky I am to have this buddy helping me through this."
yAy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tHIS is the end of the article!! No more typing and time for me to move on and FINALLY update my journal! UPDATED ON: sUNDAY, March 26 2005 @ 5:45 E.S.T..