The Wobbles Saved Me

Doubtless like others, my journey with cancer started with a shocking diagnosis, and before I could even absorb the news, I was in the hospital fighting for my life.

I had recently returned from a fiftieth birthday trip with my closest girlfriends, but I was feeling like I was thirty-five and ready to embrace the new year with my family.

Life was positive and I was grateful. I was married to my great love, Jack Quinn, a renowned attorney who had served as White House Counsel in the Clinton Administration and co-founded and sold his own public relations and consulting firm.

When we got together, Jack immediately embraced Jocelyn, my daughter from a previous marriage, as his own. And after five years of IVF, we welcomed a son, Storm. I had built and sold a business and become the host of regular dinners featuring public officials and women journalists. I loved my life. It was productive and filled with love, friendship and purpose.

But when everything seemed perfect, illness struck.  Jack had been aware of a lung disease, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, for which the cause is unknown but had largely been asymptomatic until a few months earlier when he had begun a rapid decline in lung function. Fortunately, we received a call from John Hopkins Hospital that there was a pair of young donor lungs available. It was a whirlwind. Ten days after the surgery, they sent us home after a ninety-minute lesson in dispensing the bags and bags of pills, checking blood sugar, administering insulin, IV antibiotics and nebulizer treatments.

Jack was breathing beautifully with his new lungs.  Spring was in the air and we took walks in the woods, noticing the pink blossoms just beginning to sprout from the trees.  After months of fear, life felt fresh and full of hope again.

I was filled with gratitude and confidence. But physically, I had started to feel awful. Actually, like crap. My back ached, I was constipated, and I had horrible cramps.  I wrote off these symptoms to stress. Until, that is, very irregular bleeding finally sent me to the doctor, and I was given a dire prognosis:  Stage Four cancer.  Maybe uterine, maybe ovarian, not operable, perhaps chemo could extend my life.  I might not die in a year, but I would be an outlier if I lived to see my then nineteen-year old daughter, Jocelyn, graduate from college or my seven-year-old son, Storm, make it to middle school.

Enter my girl tribe.  I had gathered a group of my best girlfriends together two months earlier for a birthday celebration in Jamaica. A group of strong, generous, brilliant, successful women some of whom did not know each other.  Five days of major female bonding.  It was as if we had all known each other since high school. No husbands. No kids. No responsibilities. We called ourselves the Wobbles because we had a few too many tequilas one night and danced to “Wobble Baby” under the Caribbean moon. This was a sisterhood that would carry me through the next few months and beyond, most importantly through the very darkest days of my life.

When I told The Wobbles of my cancer diagnosis, my college friend Elizabeth Thorp said, “This must be a mistake.”

“We need more information,” said my friend, Stephanie Cutter, who has strategized inside and outside the White House and been a major force in  presidential campaigns as she is now with Vice President Biden.

“You need to go to comprehensive cancer center,” said my friend, Jennifer Griffin, a Pentagon news correspondent for Fox News who beat a stage three breast cancer while nursing her six-month-old son.

Girl tribe was activated. It was spring break and texts and phone calls were made to scattered Wobbles on mountain slopes and far flung islands.  Four days later, I was sitting in a doctor’s office at Massachusetts General with Elizabeth and Stephanie who had flown up with me that morning to meet with Dr. David Spriggs, one of the top oncologists in the country.

“If your tumors have spread within your mesentery, I feel you would not live through a removal surgery,” said Dr. Spriggs. “This case is complicated.  Let me find a surgeon to look at your scans.”

I excused myself to the adjoining bathroom.  I looked in the mirror.  It was a good hair day; my eyes were bright, and my skin coloring was good.  I wondered how long it would take the cancer to invade my body.  I silently prayed that my husband would live a long life and my kids would not be orphans.  Back in the examination room, my friend’s faces were chalk white.

Our attitude soon changed.  Dr. Spriggs returned with a young, swoon-worthy surgeon in a cashmere jacket. He introduced himself as, “Whit. Dr. Whitfield Growdon.” He shook hands with all of us with a big smile. “Look, we don’t know what is going on here,” said Whit. “We don’t even have a biopsy.  And you’re tiny and super fit. Your scan was done without contrast, we cannot even tell where these tumors are!”

He continued, “I want to go in and do a laparoscopy and see what the hell is going on and, if the tumors are on your ovaries, like I think they are, we will just take all that crap out.  Or, if there is intermingling between the tumors and the mesentery, we will just inject chemo right then and there. I think we are going to crush this!”

What?! Did we accidentally stumble onto the set of a medical drama? Stephanie and Elizabeth and I looked at each other in disbelief.  The charisma and optimism of this doctor created an immediate shift in our mood, and you could feel the tension evaporate.

I flew back to DC to pack and forty-eight hours later, I was in a hotel room back in Boston on the eve of my surgery with Elizabeth, my friend, Kristin Cecchi and my daughter, Jocelyn, who had flown up from Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she is in college. Jack’s doctors would not permit him to travel because he was so immune suppressed after his transplant surgery.

Whit had told me that studies show that that women facing ovarian cancer who have lots of support from friends and family are more likely to conquer it.  I felt like I could practically conquer and cure the entire disease with the love from the Wobbles.

The next night, I woke up from surgery and the Wobbles were standing around my bed in the ICU.  “Whit got all your cancer!  It’s gone!” they cheered.

Everyone hugged me as I began to cry. I had no idea that this was not the end, but the beginning of a journey of pain, despair, and fear intertwined with faith, hope, and deep gratitude. And a battle for my life that surely would have been lost were it not for the utter devotion of the Wobbles, the love of my family and the steadfast Dr. Growdon.

My first surgery was nine hours. Whit removed my entire reproductive system and cut out so many of my internal parts that it took forty-nine words on my medical chart to describe the surgery.  The first forty-eight hours after the surgery, I was still so heavily drugged that I did not have much pain.  Gloria Riviera and Dana Bash (two more Wobbles) had flown up to Boston and I made them dance with me to Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger.”  My dance moves have never been stellar, but I was free of the cancer and filled with morphine. The ICU hallway became the Superbowl half time show and I was J.Lo.

The euphoria did not last long. Four days after surgery, the stitches in my colon burst and I became septic.  The pain was unbearable.  My body would shiver and convulse, and my teeth would chatter uncontrollably.

I had to go back in for emergency surgery. Whit and Dr. Peter Fagenholz (whose nickname is “Dreamy Pete”) performed a diverting ileostomy which is a bag on the outside of my body to move the waste out of my body so that so that my colon could heal.

I had so many surgeries and procedures that I lost count.  The all-consuming pain felt like it was my yesterday, today and forever.  Almost all of my friends at one time or another heard me say, “I cannot do this anymore.  I want to die.”  The love of my husband, my precious children, my friends, the joy of swimming in the ocean, walking in the woods, cooking dinner and sitting with my family—it was as if these things had happened to someone else.

My diagnosis was stage three (and not stage four as I was initially told) cancer. I spent thirty-one nights at Mass General. The Wobbles created a calendar to make sure that at least one friend (and often two or three) was always with me.

If you have ever dealt with a major illness, you know how very important it is to have an advocate with you. Someone with you each day, holding your hand  and reminding you that you will get well, you will go outside again and walk in the woods, sing Holy Grail off-tune in the car with your daughter, cook dinner for your family, cuddle in bed with your son over a Magic Treehouse book and ski and play tennis again.

This I know for certain: the love of my friends was as key to saving my life as was the brilliant and fearless surgical assault led by Dr. Growdon on my cancer.  In the worst moments, when hope seemed beyond reach, they made me connect with my intrinsic desire to live.

“I truly believe this is a moment of reckoning – all the love you have so selflessly given others and put into the world will now come together, gather steam and coalesce as one force around you, like a constellation taking shape and infusing you with superpower,” Gloria texted me.

“Cancer Schmancer! I know you are scared SQ and it’s ok because it just means you’re about to do something really, really brave. If you were any more loved, the world would explode. You got this. We got this,” Tara Patten texted.

“Hi. Daily check in to tell you this: YOU ARE AWESOME!” wrote Norah O’Donnell.

And from Nancy Cordes, “Susanna, you evicted that tumor like it was just another item on your to do list.  Mani Pedi? Check. Get blowout? Check. Beat cancer? Check. Thank u, next!  We love you and will help you fight this stupid cancer with everything we have. It’s no match for the Wobbles,”

On my thirty first day in the hospital, I had my first chemo and was finally released.  Stephanie, Kristin and Elizabeth were all there to help me fly home.  Jack and Storm were in the driveway to greet me.

***

What followed in the ensuing months was a difficult journey. Chemo, followed by more surgeries, followed by weight loss, dehydration, and more pain. The cancer battle has a will of its own; when you start to feel invincible, it shows up and tries to break you again. I was diagnosed with the BRCA2 gene.  Having lost my mother to breast cancer, it was a test that I wish I had done earlier in life as I could have taken steps to avoid cancer.  I was finally declared cancer free after eight surgeries and four months of chemo.

The brutality of cancer is breath-taking.  You are cut open, you are poked and prodded, you go through pain that you could not have imagined, you are put in hospital diapers, you throw up your guts, you have days that you want to die, you become completely dependent on other people, you are robbed of your dignity and your physical appearance is altered into something unrecognizable.  I was bald with no eyelashes, no eyebrows and a sixteen-inch vertical scar on my abdomen.

But through it all, the Wobbles were there. And I owe so much of my healing, and where I am today, to them. They inundated me with smoothies, pastries, sandwiches, and protein drinks. With visits and texts and constant encouragement. With determination. And with hope. I do not remember a time that I was not listening to an encouraging word or holding a loving hand. I am living proof to the studies that show that having support makes you more likely to conquer cancer.

I am incredibly blessed to have survived and for all the resources and support that I had.  I do not think there is any rhyme or reason to my fate.  There is pain and suffering all over the world far worse than anything I have ever endured.  So, instead of the “why” which I cannot answer, I focused on the “how.” How was this going to change me?

Was it possible to love deeper that I already have?  I am not sure.  But I can love more selectively.  Before I got sick, I loved without reservation and perhaps, without caution.  I found myself, through the illness, being so much more conscious of who I wanted to see.  I felt like I spent really quality time with people about whom I cared deeply.  I said no more often.  Time is a gift.  No one knows how much they will actually have on this earth.  Yesterday becomes today and today becomes tomorrow so very quickly.  I want to spend my days doing things that are meaningful and bring me joy.

It has been nineteen months since my first diagnosis and I have adjusted to a new normal.  But I know that cancer could be right around the corner again.  So, I wake up each day and say to myself, “Today could be the best day of my life.” And I want to make the most of it. So today, let me be a good Mom, let me help a friend, let me do things to help myself be kinder and stronger and let me be a little more adventurous.

I recently got a text from Kristin, “ SQ! If only we had a crystal ball in those dark days to know that you would be both happy and well!”

Faith is what you cannot see.  I did not have a crystal ball, but I had faith.  And a will to live that was stronger than my fear.  You can’t know how beautiful life is unless you experience the ugly parts.  And having faith through the darkest and ugliest times can sustain you until life becomes beautiful again.