Going Off Script (21 page)

Hemoglobin,
check.

Blood,
check.

“You haven’t done the mammogram,” she noted.

“Oh yeah, I meant to talk to you about that,” I said. “I’m
thirty-six. I have no family history of breast cancer, so can’t I skip that one?”

“Sorry, it doesn’t matter whether you’re twenty-six, thirty-six, or forty-six,” she said. “Dr. Schoolcraft requires all patients to have one. If there’s estrogen-positive breast cancer and you get pregnant, nine months of hormones can fuel the cancer.”

I went home to L.A. and got the mammogram the following Monday—the very last day I could do it and make the clinic’s deadline if I wanted to keep my implantation date, a week away.

On Tuesday, I got a call from the radiologist to come back and redo the mammogram. The technician had spotted a speck, in all likelihood because I had moved slightly. But then it showed up the second time, too.

“Could be something, or it could be nothing,” I was told. “You need to take it to a cancer doctor.”

I was sure it was nothing. I was fit and healthy, and women get benign breast cysts all the time, right? It was a speck, not a big mass. I underwent a needle biopsy and was so confident about the results that I went to the follow-up appointment alone. Bill was in Mexico on an Operation Smile charity mission. He had offered to cancel and come with me, but I had scoffed at the idea. “Bill, there’s no way I have breast cancer,” I insisted.

At Cedars-Sinai, they put me in the doctor’s office to wait. And wait. About fifteen minutes into my wait, I started getting a really weird vibe. Something just came over me, and all I could think of was that I had to get out of there. I did something I had never done at the doctor’s office before, no matter how long I had been waiting. I opened the door quietly and slipped into the hallway, hiding under my baseball cap and dark glasses. I made it to the elevator and started nervously hitting the “Down” button when a nurse named Jessica intercepted me.

“Where are you going?”

“Hey, you know what? I just got a phone call from work and I have to get to set ASAP,” I lied. Badly.

“You need to get back in the office,” Jessica firmly ordered.

We argued back and forth until she gently escorted me back to the room. I kept asking her if it was good news or bad news. She kept saying, “The doctor will be right with you, you’re going to be okay.” I was going to be okay! She said it and she’s got the intel, right? I sat back down in the little white room and before I could put my sunglasses back in my bag, I heard the doctor walk in.

“Giuliana, I’m sorry but…” That pause will forever be etched in my mind. I remember leaning back, like I was about to get hit in the face, my body language screaming “No, don’t do it! Please don’t tell me what you are about to say.” My mind sent a different urgent message: “This is it. Brace yourself. Your life is about to change for the worse.”

“…you have breast cancer.”

I
’ve learned since then that there are two ways women typically react to that news. Some go into shock and become very quiet and analytical. I fell into the other category. I fucking lost it. I lost my mind. My head dropped, and everything went black. I felt the ground fall away.
It’s over. This is it.
I didn’t know anything about cancer, except you die. You lose your hair and then you die.

The doctor was matter-of-factly saying something about radiation, lumpectomy, chemo, mastectomy. Cancer’s slam poetry. The words bounced off the shell that was left of me. I was in hysterics for what seemed like hours but was most likely about five minutes of straight sobbing. I asked the doctor if I could have a moment alone and made the one call I couldn’t dial quickly enough. Incoherent and wailing like a baby, I reached Bill. He
couldn’t believe what he was hearing but managed to stay calm and soothe me through his own shock. He was on the next flight home.

What I did next is something I will never be able to fully explain. I drove to work. How, I don’t know. It’s a blur. But it didn’t dawn on me to go home and burrow beneath the covers in bed, or drive to my big sister’s house so I could collapse in her arms and be comforted. I had that day’s segment of
E! News
to shoot. I told everyone my eyes were swollen because of allergies. I went to my dressing room, splashed cool water on my face, and shot the peppiest
E! News
I’d ever done. There I was, perky Miss Television Hostess, cracking jokes with Ryan Seacrest and reporting on Beyoncé’s baby bump. I was overcompensating so hard. I know I went back to work because I didn’t want my life to change. I just wanted to pretend a little longer that it hadn’t. After all, E! was my dream job and waking up seemed like an especially bad idea right then.

“Great show!” I said to the crew as usual when it was over. Then I went back to my dressing room, closed the door, fell on the floor, and cried. I checked to make sure the hallways were clear before sneaking out. At every red light on the way home, I put my head on the steering wheel and sobbed some more, not giving a shit if anyone saw me. I pulled into our driveway and sat there. Bill had called to let me know he had landed, and I didn’t want to go inside until he got home. At last, he pulled up, got out, and I crumbled into his arms.

Then we unlocked the door and went inside to our different life.

L
ove Story, Terms of Endearment, The Fault in Our Stars…
Hollywood has made us all believe in the cinematic Cancer Heroine, who’s impossibly smart, funny, brave, selfless, and beautiful even as she stares death in the eyes.

What a bunch of bullshit that is.

Staring down cancer is scary as hell, depressing, and if anything, it makes you even more vulnerable—not brave—because you realize how little control you have over your life, and how crazy-unpredictable it all is.

My instant reaction was that no one could find out. Bill and I kept my diagnosis to ourselves. Each hour we discussed whether to tell our families, and when. My parents knew, of course, that I had been undergoing tests, but there was still so much we didn’t know. You know how people say the hardest person to tell is your mother? Well, they’re right. She had been trying to reassure
me as I waited for answers.
You’re fine, Giuliana, you’re fine!
Having to tell her that her little girl had cancer was heart-wrenching, the last words she ever wanted to hear. I reached her at Babbo’s store.

“No, I can’t believe this!
Gesu, Gesu
!” she wailed.

“Mama, get Babbo on the phone,” I said before going into all the details. Babbo came on but quickly fell quiet, and I realized he was crying. When they heard the news, Monica and Pasquale were hysterical, barely able to speak. We didn’t tell anyone else for several weeks. Everything was happening too quickly, and denial was like some secret fort where we could huddle together. Letting the fear out would only give it life and make it bigger.
Giuliana and Bill
didn’t happen to be filming when I went for the mammogram or learned the results, so the people at E! had no idea what was going on. I thanked God for that small favor.

I was something of a legend as a notorious workaholic at E! I didn’t take a sick day or vacation for ten years. I didn’t set out to be such a martyr; I just loved my job and was completely wrapped up in it and devoted to it. If I wasn’t on camera, I was likely out promoting my shows at some event, or giving interviews instead of conducting them. Getting married and struggling to start a family changed that. I had a soul mate to come home to, and we had a life to build together. I didn’t hesitate to take the time off I needed for fertility procedures, and because of the reality show, everyone knew exactly where I was and what I was doing. Two days after I found out I had cancer, I was summoned for a meeting in the E! executive offices. I figured maybe they were going to add something else to my on-air duties. When I entered the room, four executives were sitting in a circle—one from each of my shows. I was told to take a seat, and informed that there was a general consensus that I had started to slack off at work.

“We brought you into this meeting because we noticed that you’re neglecting your job and have lost interest,” the head
honcho began. One by one, each of the four producers read from his own list of grievances against me, complaining about what event I had missed or day I was unavailable to anchor
E! News,
or cohost
Fashion Police,
or do interviews for
Live from the Red Carpet.
There were even complaints from the producer of
Giuliana and Bill
, who should have known better than anyone what I had been going through, since his show’s ratings were up as a result of me letting the cameras film every hope and heartbreak Bill and I had endured trying to become parents.

I listened to them all, fighting back tears and feeling the flush of indignation turn my neck, my face, even my ears bright pink. In my mind, I railed at them:
Are you all done? I have cancer! Go fuck yourselves!
I swallowed my rage and kept silent. They weren’t getting that piece of me, that pain I found too shocking, too raw, too ugly to lay bare. I was the crooked girl all over again, trying to stand just right, so no one would notice my imperfection.

“Maybe you have too much on your plate to handle,” the
E! News
guy was blathering on, “and you should scale back. Why don’t we take you off
Fashion Police
.” It was more a declaration than a question, but I cut in.

“No! I love
Fashion Police
!”

“Okay, then. The reality show,” he said. “Something’s got to give.”

This was an ongoing war of network politics:
Giuliana and Bill
aired on Style, a sister network to E! My main gig was on
E! News,
that show was alpha dog, and
E! News
and
Fashion Police
, also on E!, would occasionally go for Style’s throat if they felt the need to reassert power. Since I worked for both, there was constant bickering about
Giuliana and Bill
and at times even
Fashion Police
interfering with my anchor and managing editor duties at
E! News
. That battle I was used to. But being ambushed by all four and taken prisoner of war was new.

Maybe if I’d been in a tougher state of mind, I would have
stood up for myself and walked out of the room. But that stupid good soldier gene I have kicked in, and instead, I heard my quavering voice asking these heartless pricks to let me work harder.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been distracted. Let me have a second chance, and I’ll prove myself. I’ll be more focused,” I promised. They magnanimously agreed. I fled the room and called Bill, who went ballistic when I told him how I had just been raked over the coals.

The Emmys were the following week, and I was determined to “prove” myself to the powers that be. I was wearing a strapless red dress that wouldn’t alter properly and kept slipping down. I kept pulling it up, and it would inch down again. I was so paranoid about my boobs, that something must be different, the cancer somehow evident, and I grew increasingly mad as I felt the dress expose more and more of me. I was swearing under my breath, forgetting I was miked, and complaining to my team. “Guys, it’s falling down again! You’ve got to do something! It won’t stay up!” They couldn’t figure out what my problem was. “It’s fine!” they kept insisting. “You’re fine!” The raw footage shows me fixated on my breasts, staring down at them with such a sad and angry look on my face. When we would come back from break and that red light would go on, I was overly chirpy and animated, trying to show how interested and engaged I was.

People often ask me why I went public with the diagnosis. We certainly had the option of keeping it secret by not scheduling any shoots when we had cancer-related appointments and avoiding conversation about my illness when we were filming. There are plenty of bigger celebrities who have managed to keep life-threatening diseases completely private. I saw one in the wing at Cedars-Sinai where cancer patients are treated, and we exchanged looks of mutual empathy in the elevator—I never even told my husband who she was. But the pure shock of it—that breast cancer could happen to me, when I had no symptoms
or family history, and was so anal about maintaining a healthy lifestyle—made me realize that millions of other women out there could have no idea they were living with this silent killer, too. What if I hadn’t gone through IVF, and my new doctor hadn’t routinely insisted on a mammogram? I wouldn’t have scheduled one until I was forty—four years away. The cancer was so hard to detect and so deep, there’s no telling whether I would have felt a lump before then. My TV career gave me an instant platform to warn other women. I couldn’t
not
do that. Bill agreed. He was close to his three older sisters, and he had lost his beloved father to cancer a decade earlier. Six weeks after my diagnosis, we approached the
Today
show and said we had something important to share, and we were prepared to talk about it on air. We made plans to appear on the show the morning of October 17, 2011, a Monday.

The week before, I told my bosses at E! They were sad and felt awful, and apologized for having challenged my frequent absences. The night before, I called a handful of my closest friends and some other family members to tell them what was happening. Ryan Seacrest, my
E! News
co-host, picked up his phone with a breezy “What’s up, G?” assuming I was calling about something for tomorrow’s show.

“Ryan, I have bad news,” I plunged right in. “I’m calling to let you know that I’m going on the
Today
show tomorrow to announce that I have breast cancer and I wanted you to hear it first from me.”

Ryan, always so unflappable, sounded like he had been kicked in the stomach. “What? Oh my God,” he said. “G, oh my God. G, G, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do…” There wasn’t, but as much as I would hear those helpless words from people I knew and ones I’d never met, I never stopped appreciating them, or believing in them. As tough and full of piss as I act at times, in
reality, I harbor an inner Pollyanna who is optimistic no matter how illogical it seems. Bill often tells me it’s one of his favorite traits in me. At the end of the day, it’s not that I fight so hard, but that I believe so fiercely.

The next morning, I sat on the
Today
set across from Ann Curry as she somberly told viewers that I was there to share some very personal news. They retraced our on-air failures to conceive, from my devastating miscarriage and tearful questioning of why God seemed to be punishing us, to the cliffhanger at the end of our last season of
Giuliana and Bill,
with us happily waving good-bye as we prepared to enter the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine to undergo my fourth attempt at IVF. “Cameras off!” I had cheerily commanded. “Bye! Wish us luck!”

Ann turned to me at the end of the clip.

“Your fans are expecting you to possibly announce that you’re pregnant,” she began, “but you have other news.”

“I do have other news,” I replied. I was physically shaking, trembling so hard that Ann would remark on it at the close of our interview. “Through my attempt to get pregnant through my third time of IVF, we sadly found out that I have early stages of breast cancer,” I said. Bill and I had prepared what I would say, but I still had trouble getting the words out. “So, um, it’s been a shock, and a lot of people have been asking, ‘we saw on the season finale of your show that you went and got IVF, so what happened, are you pregnant?’ But sadly we’ve had to put that off because of the news.”

Ann deftly steered the interview to the message I had come on air to deliver.

“How you found out is important here,” she prodded.

“It is,” I stressed. “I wasn’t prepared to get a mammogram till I was forty years old, like I’d been told.” I recounted the scene
with Dr. Schoolcraft’s nurse, and how I had gone “kicking and screaming” to get the test done, at thirty-six, with no history of breast cancer in my immediate family.

“Eighty-five percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no prior history,” Ann interjected.

“I think a lot of us think we’re invincible,” I said. “Women these days are busier than ever, we’re multitasking, we’re taking care of a million people a day and a million things a day. But we have to start putting ourselves on the to-do list. A friend called me yesterday and said, ‘I’m so sorry, can I do anything for you?’ And I said, ‘Honestly, don’t feel sorry for me. Instead just call your doctor and make an appointment.
That’s
what you can do for me.’ I want women out there to know that, if you can just find it early, you could be okay. I will be okay because I found out early.”

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.