Going Off Script (23 page)

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!

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.”