Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  I vowed to keep trying to become a mother once I had recovered from the lumpectomy I had scheduled the following week and had completed treatment.

  “I’m not going to give up. I want that baby, and what’s amazing is that baby will have saved my life because I always said there was some master plan of why my IVFs didn’t work and I never got pregnant. Now I truly believe God was looking out for me…because had I gotten pregnant, a few years down the line, I could be a lot sicker.

  “So right now, I’m okay. So this baby will save my life.”

  It was the toughest six minutes and fifty-five seconds I had ever spent on television, and without a doubt in my heart, the most important.

  But my brave public face was just that. When the cameras were off, I was a wreck. Reflecting later on the massive outpouring of public support I got after the Today appearance, I wrote in my new journal:

  The world kept commending me for my strength and for being so strong and holding it all together but the truth is that was only for the cameras. Behind the scenes, I was sad and angry and vulnerable and a baby at times, literally kicking and screaming and sobbing uncontrollably…. It was a daily occurrence at least once a day but typically more like three times a day.

  Bill appeared on the Today show again via satellite the day of my lumpectomy a week later. “Yeah, it went great!” he said. “We’re very optimistic!”

  Another forced smile and half-truth so we wouldn’t spook the very people who wanted to root for us the most, the survivors and the women who suspected something might be wrong but were too scared to go have themselves checked. In truth, part of the prep for my lumpectomy involved a ninety-minute guided MRI, where the doctor used a needle to pinpoint the precise location of the mass to be removed. Since you’re in the machine anyway, they routinely check the other breast as a precaution.

  “I see something suspicious in the other breast,” the doctor reported. “I’m going to take it out.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. I wasn’t at all alarmed; I already had discovered that one of the reasons mammograms are preferred over MRIs to detect breast cancer is because MRIs are too precise; they can pick up even a slight shadow that can end up being nothing to worry about, and are notorious for giving false positives for breast cancer.

  Three days later, the pathology report came back. The margins were unclear on the small mass that had been removed. That meant it hadn’t gone as “great” as we had hoped (and announced to the Today show viewers). There was a chance they didn’t get it all. But it got even worse: The suspicious spot in my other breast was cancer, too.

  Not only was I the complete low-risk anomaly for getting breast cancer in the first place, now I was among the rare minority—less than 5 percent—of women who get it in both breasts.

  In the safe cocoon of my marriage, I met the new diagnosis with bitter resignation. My body was supposed to be my sanctuary, my temple, and now it was betraying me. Of course the lump was malignant. Why wouldn’t it be? Bad news had been crashing over us like waves for a couple of years now, since my miscarriage, and I could feel us being swept farther and farther from shore. Now, if I got a strange tingle in my arm, or even a headache, I panicked. Bill would try to placate me.

  “Honey, it’s nothing.”

  “No, you don’t understand. My body is breaking down, it’s riddled with disease. Bill! I’m going to die!”

  He would hold me and let me cry when I wanted to cry, and allow me to feel whatever I was feeling. The strength and wisdom it took to do that was incredible, an essential part of Bill and one of the reasons I fell in love with him. His own fear and confusion took a backseat as he gave me every ounce of his own emotional energy and unbroken faith. Bill let me cry when I wanted to cry and let me feel sad, I wrote in my journal. You need to feel sadness to appreciate being happy.

  During our whole long journey toward parenthood, when it felt like we were locked in an endless loop of hope-crisis-disappointment, I used to ask Bill, “When’s enough enough? Where’s the finish line? What is the meaning of all of this?” And he would always give the same answer:

  “You can have fear, or you can have faith.”

  I spent the last three months of 2011 interviewing celebrities on the red carpet for E!, gushing about what they were wearing or who they were dating. I was on camera every day. If I hadn’t gone public with my cancer, work might have provided a welcome distraction. But I didn’t have any emotional escape hatches, because everyone knew my story now. People would come up to me with sad eyes. I couldn’t take sad eyes. I laid down the law with my glam squad right after the cancer diagnosis: “Guys, I just want you to know I’m still shallow,” I announced. “Please don’t get deep on me. I want to know who’s dating who, and all the gossip, and to talk about clothes and lip gloss.”

  No one knew that I was going home to agonize with Bill over what to do next. The thought of chemotherapy and radiation terrified me. I was still young, and the repercussions of putting my body through that could last a lifetime. During my Today appearance, I had mentioned facing six and a half weeks of radiation, but the new cancer discovered during the lumpectomy had changed that. Even if I did chemo and radiation, there was no guarantee the cancer wouldn’t come back. I could end up losing my breasts anyway. One afternoon, Bill got out a legal pad as we tried to figure out my next step. Bill regards a legal pad the way some people regard Ouija boards. Just ask, and it will answer. He calls it the ninety-nine-cent solution. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that what to do about my boobs would come down to me, my husband, and a legal pad. Bill drew a column for pros and one for cons.

  I went in for a double mastectomy on December 13, 2011.

  The certainty I felt about wanting the cancer just cut away, an enemy vanquished, was coupled with my anxiety as a woman about how losing my breasts could potentially impact my marriage and my career. I was more afraid of what I would look like than Bill was, and Googling “mastectomy” and hitting the “Images” button made it worse. I called a friend who had undergone an elective double mastectomy in her twenties because she had the breast cancer gene, and bombarded her with questions about how disfigured I would be.

  “Look, I’ll just come over and show you,” Lindsay offered, adding, “Bill should be there, too.”

  The three of us sat in our living room one night, and Lindsay opened her blouse.

  “This is what it’s like,” she said. I was surprised. She looked really good. Surgical techniques had advanced significantly over the years, she explained, and the scars left were nowhere near as bad as they once were. Lots of women even underwent reconstructive surgery at the same time as the mastectomy, she added, and felt more attractive with their perky new boobs than with the ones they had lost. I felt heartened by Lindsay’s candor and courage.

  As I slipped under the anesthesia, I urged my surgeon to go on TV and tell women to get screened. When I woke up, according to Bill, I was convinced I was in a shopping mall. He captured my groggy explanation on a flip-cam and let that bit air on our show. We had opened something of a Pandora’s box with this whole bare-all reality commitment, and it just felt like there was no closing the lid now. My journal captured what the camera never did:

  Before surgery, I started crying and shaking because the needle hurt so bad when they put it in my bony hand and because I was so terrified I wouldn’t wake up. I soaked up Bill’s image with my eyes and touched his skin, his face and his hair thinking it would be the last time I would ever do that. My parents began crying which only made me cry more. I endured an overwhelming amount of grief and sadness and can’t help but tear up when I reflect back on that period in my life. It’s still incredibly painful to think about.

  Recovery was a bitch. I was no stranger to post-op misery, thanks to my scoliosis. This was almost worse. For ten days after the mastectomy, I had two drains on each side of my chest, pulling at me painfully whenever I moved. I am convinced that the only thing that got me through the pain during that rec
overy was the phrase “this too shall pass.” I would repeat it over and over in my head and it would instantly relax me or at least give me the strength I needed to make it to the next day. I give that tip to women who are recovering from a mastectomy. It helps to know that the pain has a finish line. My mother hovered anxiously—it hurt so much to be putting her through this—and she seemed to hope that a homemade pasta bender would fix everything. She was livid when I told her Bill had taken off to Colorado to go skiing six days after my surgery.

  “See, if you had married an Italian guy, that never would happen!” she scolded.

  “Really? That’s what you told your mom?” Bill protested when he Skyped me that night. He was underwhelmed by my lame cover story. The truth was, he was in Denver for a very different reason: when we got that first suspicious report from my mammogram, we had asked Dr. Schoolcraft what our options were for IVF, and he had ruled out any pregnancy for me because I would likely have to be on the anti-estrogen drug tamoxifen for five years to reduce the risk of recurrence.

  By the time I got off tamoxifen, I would be over forty, and who knew if there would still be any chance of harvesting viable eggs?

  “There’s another possibility,” Dr. Schoolcraft suggested. Had we ever considered a gestational surrogate? Surrogacy made me think of another woman having Bill’s child and then reneging on the contract and fighting for custody while she collected checks for selling her story to the tabloids. (As I’ve explained, I watched the news way too much as a kid, and there was, in fact, a landmark court case like that that had played out in New Jersey back when I was in grade school.)

  Gestational surrogacy was much less complicated. The baby would be 100 percent ours, biologically and legally. My egg, fertilized by Bill’s sperm, would sublet the fertile womb of an unfathomably generous stranger.

  Bill and I had, in fact, discussed the possibility of surrogacy long before Dr. Schoolcraft brought it up. Back then, it had been an option we quickly dismissed. We couldn’t imagine letting a total stranger babysit our kid for nine months with no supervision. It involved placing too much blind trust in someone who would then hold all the power in this altogether weird, risky relationship. How carefully did agencies actually screen surrogates? What if they lied on their applications so they wouldn’t get rejected by the program? You might never know if they had a history of mood disorders, or that suicide was prominent in their family tree. I knew someone whose seemingly sweet surrogate turned into a conniving shakedown artist who “needed” Gucci bags and other expensive “gifts” during her pregnancy. Surrogates are paid, and all their medical expenses covered, of course, but the stipends they receive are a modest fraction of the eighty thousand dollars that a single attempt typically costs. How do you screen someone to see if they test positive for altruism?

  Having run out of other options had changed our perspective, though: “Let us go home and think about it,” we told Dr. Schoolcraft.

  Bill was more hesitant than I was, but we agreed that it wouldn’t hurt to at least meet a couple of surrogates to see how we felt. We had frozen embryos stored away from previous retrievals, so we were halfway there already. Schoolcraft’s office referred us to a reputable agency they had worked with before—a matchmaker that specialized in screening surrogates and introducing them to interested parents. We figured it would take a while, but through what could only have been God’s intervention, we got a call within days: A surrogate who had already gone through the whole vetting process and was primed to go had suddenly become available because the couple she had been matched with had just gotten pregnant on their own. Did Bill and I want to meet her?

  Out came the legal pad again. This time, I jotted down all the questions we would need to ask this woman before we decided whether to implant one of our precious embryos inside her. Delphine, we had learned, had come to America from France to be an au pair when she was nineteen. Now thirty-three and married, she was a businesswoman with two little boys of her own. I wrote my little introduction to this open-hearted stranger:

  We are going to ask you specific questions about diet and such because we are very clean eaters who live a clean lifestyle, not to be annoying. We just want to make sure we choose someone who shares the same habits we do. When I was pregnant, I didn’t have a sip of wine or bite of sushi, so we want someone who will conduct themselves like I would if I could be pregnant.

  I know, could I possibly sound more obnoxious?! But how do you cede control over the most precious, important thing in your life? I couldn’t be a disinterested bystander to my own child’s prenatal care. What if she ate junk food? Or drank coffee? I didn’t want our baby sucking that up in the womb! Did she work out? Did she cook at home (as if I did a lot of that)? Was she open to eating only organic food, if we gave her a grocery allowance? Her history indicated asthma. How often did she use her inhaler? Did she eat anything with high-fructose corn syrup or, even worse, aspartame?

  “Jeez, you ask thirty questions and never once do you ask if she smokes meth or does crack?” Bill observed, only half joking. He didn’t care whether she did Pilates or not, and even though he’s a health nut, too, he refused to see the possible correlation I did between gummy bears and brain damage. He was more worried that she was some fugitive French drug lord.

  We flew to Colorado and met Delphine, who turned out to be a petite, pretty brunette whose husband accompanied her to our appointment and sat by her side on the sofa across from us while she calmly and graciously answered every question. I felt such an instant connection, I abandoned the interrogation somewhere after she acknowledged that yes, she did enjoy an occasional glass of wine. She was educated and intelligent. She confided that she had learned about surrogacy while she was an au pair, and had always wanted to become one because she thought it would be the most wonderful gift you could ever give someone. She had never heard of Giuliana and Bill, but said she would be willing to consider letting herself be filmed. We didn’t consider it a deal breaker if she decided not to, of course. We had allowed cameras to record all kinds of intensely private moments—from Bill injecting me with hormones to the two of us learning we had lost the baby when I was pregnant—but we would gladly retreat and draw new boundaries.

  We ended up signing the surrogacy contract, and as I recovered from my mastectomy, Bill flew to Denver to be there when our embryo was transferred into Delphine. It would be a couple of weeks before we found out if it took. We decided not to tell anyone, even our families, what we were doing. After signing with Delphine, though, I couldn’t resist dropping a few hints to Monica. My sister urged me not to go through with it.

  “You need to recover first, Jules. Why put more on your plate?” she said.

  “Because it gives me hope,” I had replied.

  As Christmas neared, my spirits lifted. I was feeling strong enough to go shopping for gifts on the day before Christmas Eve dressed in a cute outfit topped by a jaunty fedora. I snapped a photo and texted it to my girlfriends with the happy update: “G’s back!”

  Bill and I were driving down Wilshire Boulevard when the phone rang. It was my oncologist with the pathology results from the mastectomy.

  “Everything’s good, right?” I asked, certain that it was. And then, there it was again. That ominous pause. I told myself I was just being dramatic. The worst was behind us. I had done the mastectomy. There was no bad news left to report…right?

  “After reading the pathology, I’m going to recommend…” the doctor began. My brain raced ahead: Crap, I’m going to be on tamoxifen for five years.

  “…chemotherapy,” he finished.

  “What?” Then I just started screaming. “No, no, no! I’m not doing chemo!”

  Bill took the phone from me, the doctor’s words competing with my screams.

  “She’s HER-2 positive and HER-2 is a rare and aggressive form of cancer,” the oncologist explained. I was hysterical. Bill finished the call and pulled the car over. I was a mess, pounding the dashboard. Once I regained
some semblance of sanity, a second jolt of reality hit: Oh my God, we might have a baby coming. And there it was. If there is a way to feel your body mustering every ounce of strength it has, to feel the resolve in your very cells, that was it for me. They say that survival is a matter of fight or flight. Knowing I had even the possibility of a child coming into this world put me into fight mode. It was time to do the brave act again, and I didn’t have much time to rehearse: Bill and I were booked to host Nivea’s Times Square gala on New Year’s Eve, culminating with a “kiss broadcast around the world” at midnight. We were still shell-shocked when we got to New York City.

  On New Year’s Eve, we slipped out of an interview to take a call from Dr. Schoolcraft. We were waiting to find out whether the embryo transfer with Delphine had been successful. I had no right to be hopeful. Why should I be? I gripped the phone with trembling hands.

  “Congratulations, you’re having a baby!” Dr. Schoolcraft told us.

  Bill and I embraced for what felt like an hour, tears of joy streaming down our faces. When we kissed that New Year’s for the world to see, it felt like we truly were starting anew, that 2012 was already blessed. Bill declared it “The Year of the Rancics.”

  We flew back to Denver for every doctor’s visit Delphine had, and were overjoyed when the sonogram revealed that we were expecting a boy. I had always secretly wanted a little boy first. I felt awkward being a part of another woman’s obstetrician appointments, and I would try to sit in the chair farthest away from the exam table, to give Delphine as much privacy as possible. I wanted to be involved but not annoying, winner of the Best Expectant Mom Award at the surrogate Emmys. We would spend time just hanging out with Delphine and her family whenever we were in Denver, and a genuine friendship took root. She would call or text me to let me know how the pregnancy was going—baby’s moving a lot today, you have a very active little boy coming!