Ten Years Later

by Hoda Kotb

  “I had two kids in New York City, the fund-raising market was dreadful, and I was really tired of running a small business,” she says. “I want to help patients, but at this point I felt like a glorified administrator. I was doing HR, and accounting, and managing my employees, and I hated it. And I’m leaving my kids and not loving the job. I knew I had to fix it.”

  Lindsay began also to notice other groups popping up that addressed fertility protection for cancer patients. Packets and information kits were being given to doctors and patients.

  “At first I was feeling a loss of control, and What is going on? How are we losing market share?” she says. “And then I had this lightbulb moment. We’ve done it! We’ve succeeded! All along, all I’ve wanted is for everyone to talk about fertility. I wanted it to become standard practice. I wanted it embedded in everything that people normally do. And now it is.”

  That’s when the last line of her original business plan came to the front of her mind. Back in 2001, when she launched Fertile Hope, Lindsay knew someday the foundation would be run by someone else. Her plan ends with the following words: “Ultimately, it will not make sense for this to be a stand-alone organization. It should be part of a larger cancer experience. Once the problem is solved, we should be acquired.”

  In March 2009, Lindsay flew to Austin, Texas, on Walker’s first birthday and presented the idea of a Fertile Hope acquisition to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

  “They said yes,” she says with a smile.

  Lindsay set about the exciting process of the merger and acquisition, which was finalized in July. She joined the Lance Armstrong Foundation, serving as an adviser and consultant. Her role was to work with major health insurance companies as well as self-insured corporations. Lindsay would meet with chief medical officers or heads of human resources and make her pitch.

  “I say, ‘Here’s a business case for the benefit. I think you should cover fertility preservation for cancer patients, and here’s why it makes sense for both patients and payers.’ ”

  Working and raising two active kids in a small New York City apartment began to wear on Lindsay. There was also the emotional toll from another round of IVF treatments; the action plan was in motion for a third child. She told Jordan it was time to move to San Francisco and find a house with a yard. In September, Jordan’s boss told him of a job opportunity in the Bay Area and he jumped at it. The Becks were in their California home by Christmas.

  Following two IVF cycles with Dr. Alan Copperman, a fertility specialist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Lindsay gave birth to baby Scarlett on April 6, 2011. She and Dr. Copperman had worked together for years through Fertile Hope. When the doctor called Lindsay with word that she was pregnant, the moment was powerful. After Nancy heard the news, she sent Lindsay a charm.

  “I said, ‘Lindsay, this has nothing to do with the kids. This is all about you. This present’s for you.’ While I do celebrate her children, that was her dream. My dream as her physician is to celebrate her.”

  Jordan, one-week-old Scarlett, Paisley, Lindsay, Walker.

  Mill Valley, California, 2011. (Credit: Michelle Walker Photography)

  Now nearly thirty-five years old, Lindsay began to wonder what was next for her professionally.

  “Once you’ve had a career driven by passion,” she says, “what do you do next? How do you repeat that? Some people never have that, and I had it at twenty-four. How do you do it again? What does that look like?”

  When Scarlett was six weeks old, Lindsay took a step toward laying the foundation for her future. She entered Wharton’s San Francisco Executive MBA program. Classes are held every other Friday and Saturday for two years straight. She continues to work from home for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

  “It’s almost the perfect school for working moms. The kids barely know I’m gone. Two Saturdays a month they have Daddy Day, but I feel like that’s a dad’s job regardless.” She laughs. “Even if I wasn’t in school that might be happening.”

  Lindsay will graduate in May 2013 with a full MBA. She loves the opportunity the program offers for global study.

  “Over Christmas break I went to Africa for a week and took a leadership class in Rwanda to learn about how Rwanda’s leader achieved such remarkable change, from genocide to prosperity,” she explains. “We met with leaders and asked, ‘How do you do this?’ We then brought that information back home and asked, ‘Anyone can be a leader when things are good, but when things are bad, what do you do and how do you do it? What could be worse than genocide?’ Any corporation I’m going to run will never have that baggage.”

  Lindsay’s contract with the Lance Armstrong Foundation is from year to year, which allows her the potential for change.

  “I’ll always be involved. I’ll always be on the advisory board and advise them on fertility-related issues, but they’re so nice and so flexible on if and how we work together over time,” she says. “It’s a really rare, rare opportunity. I feel very fortunate.”

  Good fortune has been part of Lindsay’s life story. Nancy credits her with tremendous drive and courage, but Lindsay knew of four other young tongue cancer patients receiving radiation treatments at the same time she did at the University of California in San Francisco. Only Lindsay survived.

  “Lindsay’s the lucky one,” says Nancy. “I don’t know if she’ll ever know how lucky she was. Even if you have the best surgeon in the world, there’s nothing like a little luck with it.”

  I ask Nancy, now that thirteen years have passed since Lindsay’s first cancer diagnosis, what Lindsay’s medical future holds.

  “I think she can look forward to what kind of grandmother she wants to be,” Nancy says.

  For the first time in eight years, Lindsay is not taking fertility drugs, nursing, or pregnant. She’s leaving the plan this time to chance.

  “I’ve done ten IVF cycles. I don’t want to pay for any more, I don’t want to endure any more, but it’s hard to say, ‘My goal was four or five.’ ” She laughs. “Not to achieve a goal just does not go over very well for me. But, I think we’ve agreed, no more IVF, but we’re still on the fence about if we would be open to another miracle.”

  When I ask her how she manages to find balance in her very busy life (which requires spreadsheets for weekly menu planning and activities), she pops me another Nancy-ism.

  “Nancy always says, ‘You’ll never find balance. If that’s the goal you’ll always fail.’ She says you can still have it all, just not all at the same time,” Lindsay explains. “She says, ‘You have crystal balls and rubber balls, and you’re always juggling everything, and you have to identify in the moment which is a rubber ball and which is a crystal ball. Juggle them all, but don’t drop the crystal balls.’ I find myself living by those imperatives—Okay, what are the crystal balls today, or this week, or this month?, and for me those things are vacation, or family time, or my special dates with the kids, and I’m not willing to compromise them. You have to make sure, too, when you’re in a crystal ball moment, that you’re present, not half in. I don’t want to be at the park with my kids on my cell phone trying to work.”

  Those busy mental wheels, always spinning inside Lindsay’s head. Her constant forward movement fueled by action plans has left her with a full life and, ironically, some apprehension about reaching the finish line too soon.

  “When Nancy diagnosed me, when she sent me home with the pen and paper, I made a Bucket List. What do I want to do if I’m going to die? Ten years later, everything on that list is done except for one thing,” she laughs. “And I’m afraid to do the last thing because that means I can die.”

  Lindsay makes me ask what the last thing is, as if sharing it out loud means she’s one step closer to accomplishing it.

  “A safari in Africa. Jordan says, ‘Let’s go!’ But I say, ‘No, no, no.’ It’s like looking over the edge at the great big black hole.”

  Lindsay may never go on safari, but there’s a good chance her daughter Pa
isley will. One of Lindsay’s dreams for her kids is that they see the world. Before she went to Rwanda for the MBA program, Lindsay showed her kids where Africa is on a globe. Now their little mental wheels are spinning.

  “Right now, in my house, our living room is set up like an airplane. All the dining room chairs are lined up in a row and there’s a food cart in the back and they bring the food out to each other,” she describes. “They have a steering wheel in the front, and every day they pick out a place on the globe where they’re going. Paisley asks me, ‘When I’m ten can I go to Australia?’ ” And she says, ‘When I go on my honey trip’—that’s what she calls a honeymoon—‘I want to go to Africa.’ And I feel like, that’s what I want for them: a happy life of adventure and experience. You can come home to a comfortable place that you’ve earned and worked hard for, but you should know that the whole world isn’t that way.”

  Clearly, the world of medicine isn’t the same since Lindsay set out on her unplanned expedition. At just thirty-five years old, she is a pioneer.

  “Lindsay changed modern medicine,” says Nancy. “I think she will go down as one of the most heroic game changers in cancer treatment bar none. She’s right up there, to me, with some of the big doctors who have done some of the most innovative science.”

  You can’t help but wonder, What will this amazing girl do next? I ask her what message she thinks she’s left behind so far in her journey.

  “My message is, if something is important to you, fight for it. Don’t just accept the this-is-how-we-do-it approach,” she says. “Every time you hit a roadblock or are unhappy or you get a no, there’s usually a way around, or over, or under, or whatever. If it’s important to you, fight for it. I feel like my role now is to be an agent of change in the world.”

  How fascinating it will be to see what Lindsay’s fighting to change ten years from now.

  PATRICK WEILAND

  When I was hired in 1998 as a correspondent for Dateline NBC, Patrick Weiland was a three-year veteran producer. A superstar. His skills were unmatched. You had to stand in line to have Patrick assigned as a producer to your story. He could land, like few others, the elusive who, what, and where that a piece demanded. I was based in New York and he in Los Angeles, so we never had the chance to work together. I did cross paths with him a lot at 30 Rock when he was working in the city. Then, over the years, I would describe Patrick’s departure from the network as a slow fade. He didn’t just leave abruptly one day; he came and went, managing what most of us thought were garden-variety demons. We saw plenty of that at work and in our own private lives. Only when I sat down to hear Patrick’s complete journey did I realize how far he actually fell, and what a superstar he truly is.

  Patrick Weiland was born in May 1963 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His family moved to nearby Bloomington when he was four, contributing to a population boom sparked by a business boom under way in the city. Two major interstates were complete and every major sports team in Minnesota played within the city limits. Bloomington offered the Weilands a suburban lifestyle along with a lush playground dotted with parks, rivers, and lakes. Patrick grew up like many of us, lucky enough to think back on barefoot summers, unlocked front doors, and good, clean, dirty fun.

  “I had a dirt bike before I had a bicycle,” he says with a grin.

  Patrick and his three sisters grew up riding farm tractors, dipping toes in the chilly waters of Lake Superior, and packing up the family van for annual camping trips to Gooseberry Falls State Park in Minnesota and Glacier National Park in Montana. The Weiland family photo book is filled with Kodak moments that capture a wonderfully typical childhood. Snap! Four barefoot kids, sitting atop a wooden sign that reads LEAVING BLACKFEET INDIAN RESERVATION, with a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Ron Weiland worked as the head of technology for Minnesota’s newspaper the Star Tribune. His wife, Mary, was a radiation therapist. Together they provided a fun and loving home for their four children, Maggie, Anamaria, Patrick, and Sue.

  “My parents didn’t have a lot of money,” he says, “but we never felt that.”

  Patrick was closest to his youngest sister, Sue, who was just three and a half years younger than him. She loved the outdoors and from an early age felt a kinship with animals. She always had a shoebox full of rescued baby squirrels or raccoons that she was bottle-feeding. Her love of nature was matched by her love for adventure. Patrick writes about Sue in the family photo book:

  When her seven-year-old brother suggested she might just be the right size to jump off the garage roof with an umbrella and float to the ground like Mary Poppins, at four years old, Sue was game. She’d already mastered scrambling onto the roof without any help from me. The only casualty of our stunt was Mom’s nerves; she never got over the sight of her toddler—umbrella in hand—poised at the peak of the roof.

  After high school, Patrick enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Sue’s sense of adventure was equaled by Patrick’s sense of curiosity. He was drawn to science courses and planned to go on to medical school. He began working at the University of Minnesota Medical School to help pay for college. His dad was ecstatic at the idea of a future doctor in the family. Patrick completed the course-work for premed, but in his final year at U of M, he needed to balance out his science-heavy course load. Four classes would do the trick; he could graduate with a journalism degree. The curriculum required Patrick to intern at a local television station, so he chose the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, WCCO-TV.

  “They were doing an undercover report on home health care,” Patrick explains, “and I knew medical records inside and out. So I did all the research and I was the undercover person who went in and did all the undercover footage.”

  When the segment aired, WCCO gave Patrick credit as a researcher in the report.

  “They called me, like about six months later, and said, ‘You won a Peabody Award,’ ” Patrick says, shaking his head. “And I was like, ‘What is that? Is that like a Professor Peabody Award?’ I didn’t know what a Peabody was!”

  Imagine one of the highest awards in your business. That’s a Peabody for electronic media. The only honor more prestigious than a George Foster Peabody Award is an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award. A twenty-two-year-old winning a Peabody was unprecedented. In 1986, Patrick graduated from college, and WCCO hired him full-time as a producer in their investigative unit. He decided to delay medical school for a year.

  “And so I just fell in love with it,” he says. Patrick was 100 percent in.

  Dad was not. While supportive, he was concerned about Patrick’s future.

  “He said to me, ‘You’ll never make more than twelve thousand dollars a year!’ ” Patrick grins, thinking back. “And so when I went to the network and was making about ninety-five thousand dollars, or something like that, my parents were both like . . .” His eyes pop, mimicking their reaction.

  His sister Sue’s life was not unfolding with similar promise. After high school, she attended a community college for about a year but dropped out when she began dating a Minnesota outdoorsman ten years her senior. Those decisions, over time, would prove to affect Sue’s relationship with her brother and her entire family.

  In early 1993, after years of working at WCCO, Patrick received a call from the network. CBS in New York was launching a prime time newsmagazine in the spring called Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. They flew in Patrick to interview for the job of producer. He would be at least ten years younger than the other producers on staff. The kid from Bloomington was headed for the Big Apple. The idea of a fresh and exciting start in a big city prompted Patrick, now twenty-nine, to consider “coming out” professionally about his sexuality. He’d told his family in his early twenties that he was gay and had received their full support, but he’d not let anyone in his work life know about his partner of more than a decade.

  “When I was moving to New York, I thought, Well, I’m gonna come out in my final meeting before they offer me the job.”

  Look
ing back, Patrick marvels at the way ignorance and fearlessness often cohabitate in the brain. Sitting with Connie Chung and two other power players on staff, Patrick made the decision.

  “So, they said, ‘Is there anything else you need to say?’ And I looked at Connie and I said, ‘Well, yes, there actually is,’ ” Patrick continues. “ ‘I’m gonna bring my partner with me from Minneapolis.’ ”

  Crickets? Awkward silence?

  Hardly.

  “Connie Chung put her hand firmly on the middle of my thigh, looked directly at me, and said, ‘That’s just faaaaaaantastic,’ ” Patrick says with a huge smile. “It was the first time I had come out and I was so nervous, so it was just great.”

  Patrick was a producer for Eye to Eye from 1993 until the program ended in 1995. He was immediately recruited by executives from Dateline NBC, who were rebuilding the investigative unit and knew Patrick was a thirty-two-year-old phenom. He did not disappoint. Consistently exceptional work for years made Patrick a valued and respected part of the Dateline team.

  Patrick, Peggy Holter, Keith Morrison, Polly Powell, John Reiss.

  1998 Emmy Awards, New York City. (Courtesy of Malachy Wienges)

  In the fall of 1998, Patrick once again landed the hardware to back up his stellar reputation. He’d already been awarded a Peabody, several Edward R. Murrow Awards, and a highly coveted Livingston Award, given to an exceptional journalist younger than thirty-five. He would now add two national Emmy Awards for Dateline pieces he’d produced, to be presented at a ceremony in New York City. Patrick and his partner made the flight from Los Angeles to New York for the exciting event. But, also on board, like an invisible oxygen mask dangling in front of them, was a loose end.

  “I had to go get a test,” says Patrick.

  Before leaving for New York, Patrick took an HIV test, but the results would not be available until he returned home. Committed partners of sixteen years, the two were devastated by the possibility of an HIV diagnosis. On the evening of the awards, Patrick won two Emmys for Dateline and celebrated with his coworkers and colleagues. The next day, the partners flew back to L.A. where the test results awaited.