Happily Ever After: The Life-Changing Power of a Grateful Heart (24 page)

Let me explain.

In 2009, Jen heard through the media grapevine that television host Giuliana Rancic and her husband, Bill, the first winner of
The Apprentice
, were experiencing difficulties conceiving a baby. Just as she had done with me, she wanted to send Giuliana an OV-Watch in the hopes that it would help the Rancics achieve their dreams of welcoming a child of their own into the world. One problem: Getting in touch with a media personality is not necessarily the easiest thing. So Jen reached out to me in hopes that I may have met Giuliana or have information about how she could get in touch. Luckily, I had had the pleasure of meeting both Rancics and attempted to make an introduction.

I’m not sure whether Jen was ever able to connect with Giuliana and Bill and if they ever tried using OV-Watch, but from the moment Jen became aware of their struggles, she was drawn to their story and followed it closely in the press. Along with millions of others, Jen found out on October 18, 2011, that Giuliana was dealing with an even more ominous obstacle: breast cancer.

Jen remembers reading that Giuliana’s gynecologist had found a lump but that it was deemed “no big deal.” In reality, that lump turned out to be a very big deal. Thankfully, though, her fertility specialist’s stern orders helped find it early enough.
Before he would start their third round of in-vitro fertilization, he insisted that Giuliana get a mammogram and ultrasound. She reluctantly carried out his requests and was given life-altering news: cancer.

When Jen heard, it struck a chord with her. A very scary chord.

Not six months earlier, during a routine exam, Jen also had been told by her ob-gyn that she had what was likely a harmless cyst in her breast. After hearing Giuliana’s story, though, she decided to disregard her doctor’s nonchalance and made an appointment to get a mammogram the very next day. Just as Giuliana had experienced, Jen’s radiologist told her that the lump they were investigating was “not a cyst,” and soon she was scheduled for a lumpectomy. In Giuliana’s case, the doctors knew the mass that showed up on the screen was cancer, so her initial lumpectomy was a necessary procedure in attempting to save her life. In Jen’s case, they knew it wasn’t a fluid-filled cyst, but they were unsure whether it was a benign fibroadenoma or a malignant growth. A simple biopsy was too risky. Only surgery could tell.

So she waited for a surgery date. And while she waited, she worried. She was fearful that the similarities between her story and Giuliana’s would continue and a cancer diagnosis would be in her near future as well. She thought of her husband and her kids and how her once-upon-a-time dreams had played out over the course of her life. Was she proud of her accomplishments or regretful of her choices?

This is what she told me:

All my life I’ve wanted to be a mother, and I’ve spent years helping other women accomplish their own maternal dreams. I pictured
my life as a mommy—easy and carefree. We’d bake cookies, skip through fields of daisies, and I’d never raise my voice. I was naive. I had no idea how hard life is when you’re a Mom.

My children are eight and six now, and although I try very hard to be the mother I planned to be—I’m not. My commitment and obligation to my career and our financial stability as a family has been, unfortunately, my first priority over the last eight years. I’m gone most mornings when they are getting ready for school, and if I get to put them to bed and read my little girl a bedtime story, I’m rushing to finish it so that I can handle the rest of my life before midnight.

Every single day I promise myself that I will calm my life down and try to be a more attentive, kinder, more loving mother. Some days I am able to accomplish it and some days I just don’t live up to my own expectations.

Already feeling like a terrible mother and never putting my kids first, I then added the thought of a breast cancer diagnosis and ended up having a few very dramatic breakdowns. Since hearing Giuliana’s nearly parallel story and getting myself checked, I was not only convinced that I was going to die, but I also feared that my children would never know the mother that I so wanted to be.

However, I am excited to tell you that my lump was benign and I will be fine! I now have a second chance to be the mother that I know my children deserve.

And I know she will be. For this already incredibly thoughtful person, I know this brush with dread will alter her life’s trajectory, and that of her family.

Without the fear of following in Giuliana’s footsteps and receiving a cancer diagnosis, Jen wouldn’t have analyzed her
own past and tried to change her future. It was a much-needed cue to move her sweet children up the totem pole of priorities. And all of this happened thanks to the honesty and bravery of Giuliana Rancic, a woman Jen now considers a hero, and to whom she feels forever connected, even if it’s from afar.

K
EEP
Y
OUR
E
YES AND
E
ARS
O
PEN

Reminders to enjoy life come in many shapes and sizes. In our fast-paced society, we’re often too busy or preoccupied to notice them, but if we are lucky, they continue to seek us out and eventually we get the message.

I remember one day in particular that I was living the rush. I was at the Los Angeles International airport and, along with what seemed like thousands of other people, I was caught up in the stress of traveling. In a moment of calm, I scanned the room, curious about the other people at my gate. Interestingly, I was not drawn to a frustrated traveler in a heated conversation with an airline representative or a mother trying to corral her little ones to take a potty break, but instead to an airport rarity: sitting across from me was a middle-aged woman with long, curly black hair and glasses, peacefully sitting still. She wasn’t reading or writing or talking or tweeting or racing to get on a plane. She was merely taking it all in, a subtle smile lighting up her face.

I took her cue. I stopped what I was doing and chose to live the calm instead of the rush, at least for a few fleeting minutes. She was my angel of the day, reminding me to slow down, empty my mind, and just breathe.

Ever since, I try to picture her when I’m swallowed by the daily events that raise my blood pressure. I’m not always
successful, but just visualizing the calm aura she exuded amid a sea of stress helps me decelerate when my pace is going dangerously fast.

My best friend from graduate school has a similar story. As a full-time physical therapist and mother of three girls under nine years old, she is always on the go. After an especially trying week, she was feeling out of control (and she’s usually impressively in control).

She powered through her list for the day, including a quick trip to the grocery store while her girls were in school. There, she came across a woman in her midseventies she could’ve easily passed in her hurry to stay on schedule. But noticing that the woman needed help picking up a fallen bag of groceries, my friend decided to lend her a hand.

“Thank you!” the woman said. “Do you want to come home with me?”

My friend jokingly replied that that might be easier than returning to the chaos of her house.

The woman laughed and then said something my friend will never forget: “Just so you know, I really, really miss the chaos.”

With those ten simple words, this complete stranger transformed the rest of my friend’s day, week, and maybe even year . . . and most likely her family’s too. She now actively attempts to enjoy the chaos. We all should.

T
HANKS IN
G
IVING

For my family, charity work is our way to give back. We feel lucky for all our blessings, so whether it’s through time or money or posing in our birthday suits for a local fund raiser called the Vail Undressed calendar (covered up in all the right
places, of course), we try to share that luck and love with organizations we feel connected to, even if it’s for people we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting.

In 2008, we were given a wonderful opportunity to pay it forward. As part of an agreement we made with Skechers for an ad campaign titled “Nothing Compares to Family,” the company would donate $5,000 to the charity of our choosing. After working in a children’s hospital for four years and seeing firsthand the hardships thrust upon those with babies in the cardiac and neonatal units, as well as going through it to a lesser degree ourselves, I felt particularly passionate about helping out a Vail family dealing with a heavy load. I had heard about them through a friend at the Vail Valley Charitable Fund, a corporation formed in 1996 to help people in our community facing critical medical emergencies.

Even though it wasn’t our money to give, we felt honored to be given a choice in where the donation would end up. Skechers easily could have donated to the many organizations they support, but instead they allowed us to help a local family through their blind generosity.

Not knowing this family personally, we hoped that the money would lessen their financial burden a bit. On December 4, 2008, I received a Facebook message that let me know it had done just that (I’ve changed the name to protect the recipient’s privacy). It said:

Hi! I am Mary Smith. I am writing to thank you and Skechers for the grant you made possible through the Vail Valley Charitable Foundation. My family was the recipient of it and I cannot thank you enough. I had a son born at 34 weeks and then my daughter was born 17 months later with a congenital
heart defect. The bills we have accumulated are immense and the grant from the foundation will help. I hope to send you a more personal note but I couldn’t pass up this chance to say thank you. You have no idea how much this helps. Thank you, Mary Smith and family

So simple. So genuine. So cherished.

When I shared this message with my contact at Skechers, her response was: “I just got chills. How great to read and know that you touched someone’s life in that way.” The way I see it, Ryan and I were only a tiny part of their corporate kindness. I’m just thankful that we were any part at all.

T
HE
T
RUE
M
EASURE OF
M
Y
M
AN

The seventeenth-century English clergyman Robert South once said, “If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.” I believe wholeheartedly in this message, but after watching what my husband accomplished in 2010, I would have to expand it to say: The truest measure of a man is not only in doing or giving but in uniting the two for a cause greater than his alone.

That summer, Ryan’s task was the 10.10.10 challenge. The goal: get 10,000 people to donate $10 to a charity organization called First Descents in honor of the group’s tenth anniversary. Founded by a longtime friend of ours named Brad Ludden, FD provides free outdoor adventure programs to eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-olds who are either battling or have survived cancer. The $100,000 objective would allow one hundred young adults to attend and experience the inspirational power that Ryan and I have experienced firsthand.

Over the course of six months, Ryan competed in twelve races (although the list originally followed the theme and started with ten), including a twenty-four-hour mountain bike race, the New York City Marathon, the Lake Placid Ironman, and a 100-mile mountain bike race at altitudes as high as 12,424 feet. At the end of the challenge, it was estimated that Ryan had trained for over 700 hours, traveled more than 8,500 miles, and climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest four times. Yes, he’s crazy, but crazy in the best way.

With the help of both individual and corporate donations, Ryan was able to achieve his goal, and First Descents was able to cover the program expenses for one hundred people looking to defy their disease, experience a new adventure, bond with empathetic new friends, and gain a newly invigorated strength of spirit to get back to their fight.

One of those participants was Laura Esposto. She hadn’t heard of Ryan’s challenge before she applied to the program, but it was people like her who made him attempt it in the first place.

Laura was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia when she was just twenty-three years old. The day after Christmas 2008, the biggest battle of her life began as she started her first round of chemo. Never giving her full remission through her treatments, her doctors set out on a search for a bone marrow match in February 2010. It was the only remaining option for killing the disease that was slowly killing her.

Through a national search over several months, a match was found and her transplant was performed in Houston in August 2010. She returned home to Philadelphia after 100 days of isolation a “complete disaster.” She told me that everything that made her who she was, was gone. Her body
was destroyed, but even more so, her spirit was destroyed. Even with a very strong support system in a new husband, a mother who temporarily quit her job to be her full-time caregiver, and friends galore, she found herself in a severe state of depression. She realized she needed an escape and searched on young adult cancer forums for retreats that catered to her demographic. First Descents seemed like the perfect fit. Because she was unable to submerge herself in water due to the risk of infection, the kayaking and surfing options that she thought would come easily to her were both out. So she applied for a rock-climbing program that was way outside her comfort zone. Even though she was only seven and a half months post-transplant and still very weak, she was accepted, because at FD every young adult affected by cancer is eligible, regardless of physical challenges, diagnosis, or prognosis.

Feeling anxious and scared, she headed out to Estes Park, Colorado, early in 2011. A staffer nicknamed Remix picked her up at the airport in Denver and immediately got to work giving her a nickname. The group has found that it’s not only a great way to break the ice, but it also bonds those involved in a new and exciting special “club.” Most important, it gives everyone a way to leave everything behind—their names, their fears, and especially their disease. Nothing seemed to stick with Laura until she mentioned her childhood days as a Girl Scout. Since then she’s been known, at least in the First Descents family, as “Cookie” (and fittingly, her husband, who attended an FDRock program for caregivers, is known as “Leche”).