Everybody's Got Something

by Roberts, Robin

  Two snowy days after I was back from LA, I went to see Dr. Ruth Oratz, the oncologist who had carefully guided me through breast cancer. Ruth has a calm, soothing style. But there is also a fire in her eyes. She’s passionate about her work. She wants the absolute best for her patients, and she travels the world attending conferences to gain the latest information. I did a lot of research and had visited a lot of hospitals before deciding on Ruth, primarily because she treats only patients with breast cancer. Her office is a warm, inviting setting, not located in a hospital. Her chemotherapy rooms are small and intimate, equipped to hold only two patients. Other places I saw were large, cold, sterile environments. I always opt for warm and cozy.

  Ruth checked out the lump in my neck and determined it was nothing to worry about. But since I was there, she wanted to draw blood. I had done that on a regular basis, but it had been six months since my last test. Usually after a blood test, I get a call from one of Ruth’s stellar nurses like Beth, telling me that all is fine. But one day passed and no nurse called. Then it was two days. By the third day, I was willing the phone to ring. Then Ruth finally called. “Your counts are a little lower than usual,” she said. “I’m not too concerned. It could be from all the travel, or maybe you picked up a little virus. Let’s wait a couple of weeks and then have more blood drawn.”

  Honestly, I didn’t think too much about it. I had a few minor scares since completing my breast cancer treatment in 2008. Thankfully, it always turned out to be nothing. For the first couple of years, I was worried my cancer might return. But eventually, the fear subsided. I just wanted to live life to the fullest, and that was exactly what I was doing.

  * * *

  Before I joined GMA, I spent nearly fifteen years at ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports broadcasting. When I graduated college, I had one goal—become a sports anchor at ESPN. I worked hard to get there, market after market, Hattiesburg to Biloxi, Biloxi to Nashville, Nashville to Atlanta, then eventually to ESPN.

  ESPN is based in Connecticut, where I still have a home. Once, when I was still at ESPN, there was a giant snowstorm. Schools were shut down. A lot of offices were shut down, too. I thought, “I don’t want to go to work.” I called my friends Jo and Kim and they said, “We don’t want to go to work either—let’s play hooky.” But I was scheduled to anchor SportsCenter. So I called in and said, “Um, yeah, I’m not going to be able to make it. The roads are too bad.”

  They said, “But Robin, you have a big SUV.”

  I said, “Yeah, but I’m…you know, I don’t know how to drive in snow really well.”

  They said, “Well, what if we send somebody to pick you up?”

  I said, “No, that’s okay. See, I’m Southern and I don’t really want to be in a car through a snowstorm.”

  So they gave me the day off.

  My friends and I played in the snow all day. Then we went to Naples Pizza and SportsCenter was on. Several people turned to me and said, “Aren’t you…” I just smiled and said, “Yep, but you don’t see me here. You don’t see me!”

  When I think of my closest friends, like Jo and Kim, they are all from the eighties and nineties. I am most comfortable with people who knew me before I was on national TV every day. They are so amused when folks come up to me asking for an autograph. When someone wants to buy me a drink, my friends like to joke: “Robin can afford it, buy us a drink!”

  * * *

  That February, as I waited the two weeks for my next blood test, I tried to shake off the exhaustion that was my constant companion. No matter how much I slept, I woke up bone tired. It was winter. I wasn’t feeling well and I desperately wanted a sick day. But when you’re on morning TV, there is no calling in sick just because you’re feeling punky and you want to sleep in. Your job is to help all the people who don’t want to get out of bed start their day on a positive, well-informed, entertaining note. You don’t call in because you want to spend the day in your PJs, watching movies in bed. And you certainly don’t call in because you want to frolic in the snow with your friends. Can you imagine how many iPhone videos would show up online if I called in and then went to Central Park to play in the snow with my dog and my friends?

  Every once in a while, my friends and I gather at my home in Connecticut. Those are fun times when I’ve got my beloved dog, KJ, with me and we all bundle up and go out for a walk. It only takes one snowball to start a fight. Someone balls one up and then it’s on.

  There’s an art to throwing snowballs. You’ve got to make them quickly and efficiently. You’ve got to aim them with both speed and precision. Then you’ve got to run like the dickens when they start coming your way. With snowballs, you’ve got to be able to dish ’em and take ’em.

  After I had the second set of blood work done, I waited for the all-clear call. When Dr. Oratz called, I could tell from the tone of her voice something was wrong. She said, “Robin, you need to see a specialist.” Her words came hurling at me like a dirty snowball, the bad news a block of ice packed in the fresh, soft flakes of her care and concern. But I couldn’t run from the voice at the other end of the phone. I couldn’t dodge the news that was coming my way. I did what we do when we can’t measure the threat or manage our fear. I froze.

  Chapter 3

  MD Say Whaaat?

  The next step, the doctors explained, would be to have a bone marrow biopsy. Let me try to explain what I understood. When you’re sick, but you don’t look it and you don’t yet feel it, your body can do a good job of harboring the fugitive illness. A bone marrow biopsy is like a SWAT team sent in to search a high-rise building. If something is hiding, the procedure will find it out.

  It’s a painful procedure: A long needle penetrates your skin, then your flesh, then the bone and into the middle of the bone. It’s from there that they take out the marrow. It’s the furthest from the outside of your body that you can get to the inside of your body. But it is effective. So as I lay on the table, I willed my mind to not focus on the discomfort, but on the outcome. When this test was over, I would know what was wrong. Maybe I had developed some kind of anemia. Maybe I had caught a bad virus, and because I’d powered through my exhaustion for the Oscars, it had turned into something I now had to address. A severe case of mono would explain both the elevated white counts and the exhaustion.

  There’s a story I’ve told before. When I was a freshman basketball player at Southeastern Louisiana University, my coach, Linda Puckett, devised a challenging drill. She instructed the team to stay in a crouched position as we slid all the way around the court. We were not to stand up until we reached a certain point. I was in the middle of the pack as we did the drill. When we were finished, Coach Puckett got right in my face and said, “Hon, you are going places in life.” It turned out that I was the only one who remained in the crouched position for the entire time.

  When it comes to the things that matter, like my health, I have a great ability to focus. Back in March 2012, I thought that was all this was about—something in my body was telling me it needed my attention. I was confident that if I focused on my health, went to the doctors, did what they told me, everything would soon be back to normal.

  A recurrence of cancer must’ve been nestled in the back of my mind, but my oncologist had sent me to have tests done on my blood cells. If the nodule had been of concern, another tumor developing, then Ruth would have taken the lead. I didn’t think that another round of cancer was what I was facing.

  That was the end of March. After my appointment, I headed off for a much-needed weeklong vacation. Amber and I like to go to Key West during Final Four weekend. Where would you rather be when you’re watching college basketball? Inside an arena or outdoors? We opt for the latter. We can position the television in our house so we can watch it from the pool. I’m being very generous when I say pool; it’s about the size of a large bathtub. But it’s great. Actually, it’s perfect.

  I treasure my vacations. I don’t have to worry about 3:45 a.m. wakeup calls. No ne
ed for me to spend an hour in a makeup chair or get dressed up in the latest fashion. On vacation, if I’m not in my swimsuit, I’m in a pair of board shorts, Kai-Kai flip-flops and a ratty tank top. That’s the beauty of Key West. It’s very laid-back, easygoing. I’ve been going for so many years that I even get local discounts. The only problem is when a cruise ship is in port. The tourists, who aren’t locals, come up and ask for autographs and pictures. I don’t mind, but I enjoy being just an anonymous local so much more.

  A group of friends and I have owned a little two-bedroom bungalow in an unassuming neighborhood for years. We have rocking chairs on the front porch and a white picket fence. Our neighbor next door, Tom, gives the best massages on the island. A few doors down, walking distance, is our favorite restaurant for dinner, the Flaming Buoy Filet Co.—you must have the spicy chocolate quesadilla for dessert. And right around the corner from our house in the heart of Old Town is the most authentic family-friendly Cuban restaurant, El Siboney. It’s a hidden jewel and a local hot spot, especially for lunch. Their homemade sangria is out of this world. That’s pretty much how I spend my time in Key West: eat, drink and be merry.

  My favorite part about spending time in Key West is riding my bike everywhere. We have these old bikes: mine is orange, Amber’s is white, but they both have sweet and cheesy floral baskets. Our bikes are so old you can hear us coming from a mile away—we just squeak, squeak, squeak down the road. We always take the back roads and go past the cemetery. My favorite tombstone says, “See? I told you I was sick.” It’s so much the spirit of Key West that even the gravestones make you smile.

  But this time it was also Katie Couric week. She had agreed to sit in for me when I was on vacation. I want to make it abundantly clear that Katie and I are good. We like each other and have always had the utmost respect for each other. No problemo whatsoever. Got it? Our show had been fighting an intense ratings war for months, and we were just on the brink of overtaking the Today show, Katie’s former team. Keep in mind they had an incredible 852-week winning streak going. So having Katie as a guest host made news and invited speculation. Plus our network ran endless promos touting her return to morning TV. Perhaps we could have explained it to the audience a little better, but many viewers thought I was going to be fired and replaced by Katie.

  There was an upside. So many people felt sorry for me and thought that I was going to lose my job, that everywhere we went people wanted to treat us to dinner and drinks. It’s such a wonderful element of the human spirit: how we cheer for the (perceived) underdog. People kept asking, “Are you worried about this?” All I could think was that my back hurt from the bone marrow aspiration and I’m waiting for this call. I thought, “The doctor will call. Like they always do and they’ll give me the all clear.”

  It wasn’t until I was back from vacation that I finally got the phone call. It had been a week and a half, going on two weeks, since my bone marrow biopsy. It was so stressful waiting for the results while contending with the postvacation blues. I wasn’t poolside. I wasn’t on my bike. I was back at work, still feeling under the weather and exhausted, waiting for that dang phone to ring.

  I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in my den, watching TV and I answered the phone. It was the specialist. The times I’d talked to him before, he’d had a joking manner, which I liked. Right away, I could tell from the tone of his voice that this was serious. I just didn’t know how serious. He went on to describe in medical terms what he had discovered in the bone marrow. Pending further tests, all indications were MDS.

  I said, “Slow down, slow down.”

  He said, “MDS.”

  I said, “I have MS? Multiple sclerosis?”

  He said, “No, not MS. Myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare disease that we used to call pre-leukemia.”

  I was so confused. “I have pre-leukemia?”

  He explained what myelodysplastic syndrome was and how I’d have to come in for further testing. He explained that MDS was actually an umbrella term for a group of diseases that affect the blood and bone marrow. The range of diseases ranged from “mild and easily managed” to “severe and life-threatening.” He said that while MDS presented primarily in patients over the age of sixty, you could be affected at any age. He also said that one of the concerns was that depending on what kind of MDS my system showed, it might develop into a severe form of leukemia called acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML. In AML, the bone marrow revolts on the body entirely, creating clusters of cancerous cells called leukemic blasts that can build up and overtake the healthy cells in your body. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he explained. “What we know is that the preliminary results indicate MDS, and we must begin to act quickly to get as much information about how the disease is presenting itself in your particular case.”

  I just sat back on the couch. I was numb. I had no idea what this was. None. Then I went and did the very thing we always tell people not to do—and that’s go on the Internet. The terms that kept coming up, again and again, were: “leukemia,” “bone marrow transplant,” “poor survival” and “dead.”

  It scared the daylights out of me. A half an hour before, I’d never even heard of MDS. I was on the computer and I couldn’t even spell “myelodysplastic syndrome.” I was just reading scary fact after fact about the prognosis and survivability. Maybe I was just hitting all the wrong pages, but it was not good. I remember I started shaking. I was alone and I just started crying hysterically. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  Chapter 4

  #1

  I waited until the next day to share the news of my diagnosis with Amber. We met at the gym in my apartment building, worked out with our trainer, Angel, then came back upstairs to my apartment. I was glad I had waited a day; I was calmer and had time to sit with the news for a while. Like me, Amber had no idea what a bone marrow transplant or MDS was. I went over what the doctor had said and what I had read on the Internet. We were both just baffled at the idea that I could have this illness that we’d never heard of, with a treatment we couldn’t picture or really understand. It was so different from the breast cancer diagnosis. We both knew exactly what that was, and we knew people who had beaten it.

  I explained that the next day I had an appointment with an oncologist, and Amber cleared her schedule to come with me.

  “We’re stronger than this,” Amber said, squeezing my hand.

  “Whatever this is,” I said.

  “Whatever this is,” she whispered back.

  Then she hugged me, and I felt so grateful knowing that whatever was ahead of me, I wouldn’t have to go through it alone. I pride myself on being strong for other people. It’s a gift to have someone in my life that has, again and again, shown that she is more than capable of sharing any load that I have had to bear.

  The next morning, it was back to work. After nearly twelve years on GMA, my morning routine is, as you can imagine, well honed. My first alarm clock goes off at 3:45 a.m. Yes, I said my first alarm. On my nightstand, there’s a clock/radio alarm set to the latest hits. With Beyoncé or Lady Gaga blaring, I hit the snooze button. My BlackBerry alarm is set for 4:00 a.m. I purposely place it across my room so I actually have to get out of bed and turn it off. I get back in bed and turn on the TV. I spend a few minutes watching ABC’s America This Morning to get a sense if anything has happened in the world during the few hours I was sleeping. At 4:30 a.m., I take a shower…while listening to my friends on WABC, ABC’s New York station. Shortly before 5:00 a.m., I take KJ out for a quick walk so she doesn’t have to cross her legs until the dog walker comes at nine. I leave the TV in the kitchen on for KJ, and I always wonder: When we mention her name on GMA, does she start barking up a storm? By 5:00 a.m., I am out the door.

  At 5:05 every morning, I head downstairs where my ride awaits. We’re fortunate that the show sends a driver to pick us up every morning. Actually, I don’t think they trust us to get to work on our own so early in the morning. Dario is my driver. As soon
as I climb into the car, he says, “God bless you, Miss Robin!” And I say, “To you, as well.” Then we’re off for the ten-minute drive to the studio, listening to gospel tunes in the car.

  Back in spring 2012, Good Morning America was still the number two morning news show. I’m very competitive by nature. I never experienced a losing season in any sport until my senior year at Southeastern. That really stung. At the local TV markets where I worked, I often enjoyed the feeling of being number one. Especially at the station in Nashville, where we won a number of prestigious Peabody Awards and were dominant in the market. And, of course, at ESPN we had no competition.

  It was different at GMA. We were the perennial underdog to the Today show. I’ve always been proud of the work we have done there, and I never felt as if what we did was second-rate at all. It’s difficult to change people’s habits in the morning. We all have our routines. When I started at GMA, I had close friends who still watched the other show. They had grown up watching Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Ann Curry and Al Roker, and despite our friendship, they couldn’t change their morning ritual.

  After I became the third co-anchor with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer, we came within forty thousand viewers of beating the Today show one week. It was very exciting, but that was as close as we came. When our current roster came together, things really began to change. George Stephanopoulos, a gifted political correspondent, joined the show as an anchor in 2009. ESPN alum Josh Elliott joined the show as news anchor in 2011. Sam Champion was our beloved weather anchor, and rounding out the team was Lara Spencer as our lifestyle anchor.