Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  Alone, I opened my journal to express, once again, my most private fears:

  Sad I can’t be the pregnant one. The one to carry my son. What if he doesn’t recognize the uterus he’s growing in? I keep thinking he will be lonely, confused, scared and cold. Wondering where his mommy is. I find it’s easier if I stop picturing him as a growing fetus and instead imagine him as a three-year-old. A gorgeous little towhead with floppy hair, chubby cheeks and irresistible dimples. Olive skin with big brown doe eyes and a button nose. I picture him acting rambunctiously, having a tantrum on an airplane as Bill and I pass him between our laps, and finally calming down after a DVD-player intervention complete with headphones and his favorite cartoon…These are the images I focus on to get me through the anticipation and nerves.

  It’s funny, when I look back at that, how my favorite fantasy of motherhood wasn’t the classic image of cooing parents holding a gurgling baby or watching him sleep sweetly in his bassinette. Traveling with a cranky toddler probably rates up there near the top of parental nightmares, but there it was, my dream sequence. Maybe it had something to do with me not just wanting a baby at that point, but wanting to give life—life at full volume, full speed, life in full color. It also shows how I yearned to give back to my child what everyone I loved, and people I didn’t even know, had given me so abundantly over the past few years: comfort and compassion.

  Back home in L.A., Bill and I settled on a nautical theme for the nursery and painted it pale blue and beige. Bill loves the water, and thought it would be calming. We bought a glider, and a little sofa where we could sit and read stories to our son. We tried out names. I liked Rush, which was the name of a popular street in downtown Chicago. “Rush Rancic?” I tried it out loud. “That sounds like a porn star,” Bill said. He was right. I put out a name I’d always liked: Landon. Landon was a private high school in D.C. with a lacrosse team full of hot guys. My girlfriends and I used to go to their practices and yell lewd things.

  Wanna piece of public school girls?

  NO! GO AWAY!

  Yes, you do!

  NO, WE SAID NO! GET OFF OUR PROPERTY!

  After he pondered Landon Rancic for a few minutes, it dawned on Bill to ask what my deal was with the name. I explained the history. He looked at me with that unique expression he has that so perfectly reflects being dumbfounded and disgusted at the same time.

  “Do you really think I’m going to name our child after a hot private school whose students you sexually harassed?”

  We moved on. Another name we both loved was Luke, who was the middle son of Bill’s sister Karen. Luke was the cool nephew who always liked hanging with us and appreciated my frankness when I helped the boys with their homework: “Okay, you’ll never use this in your life, so just skip it. You do need to know how to spell. Math—just addition and subtraction. Anything else, fractions and shit, use the calculator. Or use your phone. They’re tricking you guys, just like they fooled me.” Our pet name for him was Luke the Duke.

  “How about Duke?” I suggested. We both loved it. The middle name had always been a given—Edward, after Bill’s beloved father and my father, Eduardo. But at the last minute, we made Edward his first name and Duke his middle name, leaving it up to him to decide which one he preferred later in life based on whatever career path he went down. Duke would be our son’s NFL name, and Edward could be his CEO name. Done and done. Our happiness felt solid and true, something that could hold us up without shattering and drifting away.

  Cancer is an algorithm: plug in the data, calculate the risks, spit out the options. I had a cancerous tumor and was HER-2 positive. That was the not-so-good news. The better news was that the cancer was extremely small—not billions of cells but a number you could actually count. If cancer is an invading army, I had the advantage that this one didn’t seem to have sent out draft notices yet.

  I’ll admit it: Vanity was a factor in my first gut reaction to chemo. Avoid chemo. Chemo is ugly. No way was I going to lose my hair. My long blond cascade of waves had always been a signature part of my look. If I had to have cancer, I wasn’t going to have Ugly Cancer. (Nor, for that matter, was I going to have Playmate of the Year Cancer—when I had elected to have breast reconstruction at the same time as my mastectomy to avoid another surgery down the road, Bill was way more amused than he’ll ever admit by the prospect of shopping for implants. It got a couple of cups less exciting when he realized it was my choice, not his!) I knew that if my hair fell out, it would grow back, and I knew Bill genuinely meant it when he said what I looked like didn’t matter to him. He would love me bald as much as he loved me with hair. Hollywood is full of wigs and extensions; it’s not like all of those full, glorious manes you see on the screen or in the pages of your favorite magazine actually belong to the stars whose heads they grace. I supplemented with my fair share of extensions, too. Fakery can be fabulous, I knew that. But losing my hair, becoming one of those courageous do-rag women, made my cancer too real, as if the disease had slipped its internal borders and stormed my “real” world on the outside. I thought I had outsmarted it by undergoing the mastectomy; one of the big “pros” on that legal pad had been that I wouldn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder with mammograms every six months, or undergo round after round of chemo and radiation. I had wanted it to be over and done with.

  But it wasn’t, and now I had a new decision to make.

  Early on in my diagnosis, Bill had tried to ban me from the Internet because I was obsessively reading every forum, website, blog, and article I could find about breast cancer, without rationally trying to separate fact from fiction, or educated experts from batshit nut jobs. I hadn’t stopped, of course, but I had gotten a lot more discerning, and I was no longer just blindly searching for answers; I was learning how to ask questions, too. Remembering how close I came to an unnecessary blood transfusion the time my ovaries had overstimulated, we began making the rounds of cancer experts for a second, then a third opinion.

  When my brother-in-law used his connections to get me in to see one of the country’s top cancer doctors, I was deflated when he told me he would recommend chemo, too.

  “Why?” I pressed.

  He surprised me with his frank answer: Chemo was a crap-shoot, and there was no way of knowing whether you would be one of the lucky ones. It wasn’t a matter of me needing chemo, the way you might need an antibiotic, or need iron. Because HER-2 was so aggressive, chemo was always prescribed, regardless of the size of the cancer or any other factors in that algorithm. In my particular battle, it was starting to sound more like an offensive measure more than a defensive tactic.

  “I want a number,” I insisted. What were the odds of chemo changing my prognosis?

  “I can’t give you a number,” the oncologist said.

  “I want to know what the percentage is of it helping me,” I tried again. I kept asking and asking, reframing the question any way I could. I was in journalist mode. Finally, the doctor saw I wasn’t going to stop. He looked across at me and answered.

  “Two percent.”

  I performed my own quick algorithm: Given the mastectomy, the small number of cancer cells found, and the early stage of the cancer, I had already been told that my survival rate was 94 percent. Going through chemo would bump that to 96 percent. What nobody could tell me, and no algorithm could predict, was what that extra 2 percent advantage would cost my body in the long run. Pumping toxins into your body affects the healthy parts of you as well as the diseased parts being targeted. Things like nerve damage, heart disease, and forgetfulness—known as “chemo brain”—are all common side effects. I was going to be a mother now. The unknown, for me, was far more terrifying than sacrificing that 2 percent margin. But why, if the pros were so tiny here, were the doctors pushing chemo so hard?

  At the National Institutes of Health, I finally got that answer.

  “No one is going to tell you not to do it,” an expert we saw there confided. “Every doctor will tell you to do chemo
because they don’t want to be the one not to, and be wrong. Yes, this is HER-2, but it’s so early and there are so few cells, and given your age, I can’t imagine it ever coming back, but most every doctor will still prescribe you chemo and now it’s up to you to decide what you want to do.”

  “I guess we’ll call the doctor when we get back to L.A. and get you started,” Bill said as we completed our educational tour of cancer experts. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “Or not,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Bill asked. I took a deep breath.

  “You heard the doctor,” I went on. “I do chemo, or…I do nothing.”

  I just had a gut feeling. I had to ask and ask, and dig and dig, to get my odds. But now I had them, and going from 94 to 96 percent was not enough reason for me. When I put it like that, Bill tended to agree and, shifting into executive mode, assembled a personal “board of directors,” as we called them, to guide us further. Our “board” consisted of the doctor who had given me the 2 percent figure as well as Dr. Devchand Paul, a top oncologist with the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers; Dr. Richard Childs, a cancer researcher from the National Institutes of Health who at one time had treated Bill’s father; and my surgeon, Dr. Armando Giuliano. Bill arranged for all four experts and the two of us to jump on a call together. Not an easy feat, but Bill is nothing if not persistent.

  I took the call in my dressing room at E!, quietly listening to the experts discuss whether or not I should do chemo, and what my treatment should be now that we had all the pathology results in front of us. By the end of the hour-long conversation, a decision had been made: I would opt out of chemo and go on a five-year regimen of the oral cancer drug tamoxifen. The decision had been a unanimous one.

  Shortly after, I embarked on night one of my 1,825 nights of tamoxifen. It took me twenty minutes of staring at that little white pill to finally muster up the courage to swallow it. I’m that girl who never has a headache and never takes medicine unless she absolutely has to, so to take that first pill, knowing there would be 1,824 pills to follow, was daunting, to say the least. I took it, and continued to reluctantly take it night after night, dreading the reported side effects it could carry: hot flashes, blood clots, and a decreased interest in sex, among others. Then a few months in, I was reaching for my pillbox and had a moment of enlightenment: Don’t think of this little white pill anymore as a cancer drug, I coached myself. Think of it as a vitamin that is nourishing your body and making you stronger and more vibrant. And that was it: after that moment and still today, I actually look forward to taking my little white vitamin—a life lesson in the power of perception and how your attitude toward something can make all the difference in the world.

  But the biggest difference of all in my world arrived six months later.

  We flew to Colorado the last week of August as Delphine’s due date approached. Bill and I tried to work off our nervous energy by hiking in the mountains until it was time to go to the hospital. As Delphine labored in the delivery room, Bill and I went stir-crazy in an exam room down the hall, giddy and goofy, blowing up gloves like balloons and generally acting like hyperactive idiots until a nurse knocked on the door and told us it was time. Our son was about to be born. We quietly slipped into the delivery room and stood at Delphine’s head, crying and offering her encouragement while her husband and a nurse hovered at her feet and coached her. Everything happened so quickly. I heard the baby screaming and started crying hysterically. Bill cut the cord, and the next thing I knew, I was holding my newborn son against my chest, skin to skin, our hearts beating together at last. It was August 29, 2012, and Edward Duke Rancic had entered the world.

  As I held our baby in that Denver delivery room, it was truly remarkable to think that in the course of eleven swift months, I had experienced the darkest day of my life and now, the brightest, most beautiful day of my life. I finally had what I wanted most, and every minute felt too precious to waste.

  I sat down one night soon after to write my next chapter. I had been thinking about it off and on since I got married, but now it had taken on a new urgency. It was addressed to the top brass at E!

  “This is the hardest letter I have ever written,” I began, “but it’s also the most meaningful. For the past 11 years, E! has been my home and there is no place I would have rather been. With that said, this letter is not one I would have ever imagined I would write. Not in my wildest dreams.”

  I went on to recount the feeling that the world had instantly crashed down around me when those four words—you have breast cancer—forced me to face my own mortality at thirty-six years young.

  “I instantaneously began sobbing and couldn’t stop sobbing while the doctor said words like mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy,” I wrote. “I could only think about dying. I was truly distraught. Once I picked myself up, what did I do? I got in my car and I drove to work…I went to the place I had gone every morning for the past 10 years. My home…E! I wiped my tears and walked through the newsroom at E! News like I did every day. I went to my office and instead of closing the door, I left it open and put a big smile on my face as if it was just another Tuesday. I walked onto the set of E! News with Ryan that day and made a promise to myself beforehand that I would be overly enthusiastic and peppy to overcompensate for the incomprehensible pain I was feeling inside. Not a single soul on that set or watching the monitors in the building had any hunch at all that I had just received the worst news of my life.”

  But I had gone back months later to watch the tape of that episode, and what I saw broke my heart.

  “I had expected to see some sign of duress, a sign of a woman trying to hide a painful secret,” I wrote my bosses. “Instead, I witnessed the complete opposite. And it made me realize I have always put my job first. Even in the most strained moment of my life.

  “After 11 years at E! News, I have decided to resign as lead anchor. This has been a difficult decision for me to make but one that will allow me to spend more time with my growing family and to devote more time to my charitable efforts, particularly those that focus on women battling breast cancer.”

  I slipped it into my handbag to drop on the desk of the E! president the next morning.

  It was time to leave on top and find my purpose in life.

  chapter eleven

  I couldn’t believe I was quitting my job. My dream job, no less. It felt strange to think of myself not being at E!, no longer part of the daily adrenaline rush of a newsroom covering the ever-shifting landscape of pop culture. What would my life feel like without all these amazing people who filled my working hours? Was I really cut out to be the suburban stay-at-home wife and mother I liked to imagine myself becoming, or would that fantasy get snuffed out with my first snowbound week of a Midwestern winter? Who was going to gossip with me in the real world about Kim Kardashian’s latest selfie with the kind of insider knowledge Ryan Seacrest provided? Or offer up the kind of hilarious wisdom that only Joan Rivers could? If I retreated from the public eye, would I lose that treasured connection with fans whose prayers had carried me through more dark tunnels than they could possibly know? On the other hand, I felt excited and relieved that I was taking this drastic step.

  My crazy career simply never allowed me to pour 100 percent of myself into taking care of my family or myself. Whatever I’m doing, I want to be all in, fully present. The last few years had been so busy, juggling four shows as well as my endorsements and business ventures. Whenever I left the office and walked through my front door at home, my heart would be singing, “I’m all yours now!” to my family, but in truth, there wasn’t nearly as much of me left to give my son and my husband as I wanted, or as they needed. And I needed more of them, too, to nurture myself. Walking away from Hollywood was a choice I was ready to make. Pam read the draft of my resignation later and urged me not to deliver it. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, as both my manager and friend of nearly twenty years. “Sleep on it.” I did, then went back and tol
d her my decision was still the same. “Okay,” Pam said. “I’ll set up a meeting.” Pam, my agent, Nancy, and my lawyer would go with me to tell my bosses I would not be staying when my contract was up in a year and a half. I owed it to them to deliver the news in person. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to hold it together. The little girl who had rehearsed every moment of her dream career back in her pink Laura Ashley bedroom had never thought to practice saying good-bye.

  Ted Harbert had been promoted by our parent company to chairman of NBC, and Suzanne Kolb was E!’s president at the time. “What brings you all here?” she asked as our respective teams settled in. Tears were already stinging my eyes, and I momentarily regretted not just taking the chicken’s way out and sending the resignation letter via e-mail. My agent took the lead, conveying my gratitude for the wonderful years I had spent at E! before telling Suzanne that I had decided it was time to leave. The new baby, my recovery from the mastectomy, and a commuter marriage were too much to juggle. I braced myself for the next part, where the E! brass would thank me, wish me luck, and tell me they’d make arrangements for me to clear out my dressing room and turn in my parking pass. Their response caught me by surprise.

  Hold on, hold on, hold on! What can we do to make your life better? What would make it easier for you?

  “Ummm, well…I haven’t thought about that,” I admitted. I had seen this as an all-or-nothing situation.

  Suzanne and the other executives urged me to go figure out if there was a scenario that might entice me to stay. I left the office and called Bill.

  “So that didn’t go quite like I thought it was going to go,” I said, filling him in on what had just happened. He was looking forward to both of us living full time in Chicago even more than I was, and had been waiting several years for me to deliver on my pre-engagement promise that we would spend no more than one year in L.A.