32
“Shit.”
THE DAY AFTER Jay’s surgery, Dr. Nash summoned me to one of those nondescript rooms at the end of a hospital hallway; the kind with a Naugahyde sofa and a random poster of a sunset on the wall. He had looked at the scans. I could barely breathe, waiting for him to speak.
His eyes locked on mine. “This is much tougher than I thought,” he said. “The cancer has spread. Jay has tumors all over his liver. His prognosis is very bleak.”
Writing this, I’m hurtled back to that paralyzing moment. Dr. Nash hadn’t told Jay. And I didn’t tell him either. That was the first in a series of omissions, half-truths, and outright lies I allowed in order to protect him. Which I had no right to do.
Jay’s mom, Carol, came to see us at New York Hospital. She had a buzz cut after months of chemo. I asked her if she would take a walk with me down the hall while Jay rested. I told her what Dr. Nash had told me.
I loved Carol, the Monahan matriarch, who’d raised her seven children—all with wildly different personalities—in a lively, loving home. Her response was out of character.
“Shit,” she said.
THE URGENCY OF Jay’s situation propelled me into relentless “I’ve got to fix this” mode. Every advantage I had gaining access to the top people at the top institutions, I exploited without apology. I called Steve Rosenberg, the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who’d pioneered immunotherapy. I asked him if he could take a look at Jay’s scans.
A few days later, we were back on the phone. “This is very, very serious,” Dr. Rosenberg said, actually sounding shaken. His words knocked the wind out of me. But they also strengthened my resolve to leave no stone unturned.
The questionable ethics didn’t keep me from letting colleagues turned close friends fan out, using “I’m calling from NBC News” to open doors and gather information from research institutions and drug companies. I turned the makeup room at the TODAY show—deserted after 10:00 a.m.—into a call center, reaching out to far-flung specialists. I contacted a pharmaceutical company in Israel to ask about a monoclonal antibody they were developing. Tim Russert introduced me to Dr. Alan Rabson, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, who was so supportive and had helped many desperate family members during their ordeals. I’d call him regularly with questions that came up in the research I was doing: “Dr. Rabson, what about this new drug oxaliplatin that’s being developed by Sanofi?”—a pharmaceutical company in Paris. “What’s the latest on Avastin?”—an experimental drug designed to kill tumors by cutting off their blood supply. “Could Jay be a candidate for ablation?”—a treatment using high-energy radio waves to pulverize tumors. It got to the point where he greeted my call with “Dr. Couric, good morning!” Jay didn’t want to fixate on his treatment or his chances, so I took that on for him.
I negotiated with God and anyone else within earshot to keep the cancer in check until a scientific breakthrough was announced to the world. I searched the term cancer every day on my computer, hoping that I’d see a promising new clinical trial or drug on the market that would give hope to thousands of patients, starting with Jay. I inhaled JAMA, The Lancet, and any other scholarly publication I could get my hands on, trying to decipher the language of cancer. Powered by fear, desperation, and love, I was a quick study.
The pressure, the dread, were constant. Sometimes when the TODAY show was over, I’d collapse on the floor of the bathroom in my office, bum a cigarette from my hairdresser, and sob. Ridiculous, I know—my husband has cancer and I’m smoking, but that’s how completely undone I was. I’d keep it together for the show, the only two hours of my day when I wasn’t obsessing over Jay’s fate. And then at 9:02 a.m., I’d fall apart.
33
The Worry Cup
IT WAS MORE than my mind could process, the idea that I might lose my best friend and partner. And the girls—how would they be without a father? Ellie was old enough to have already stockpiled many sweet memories of her dad: awkwardly brushing her unruly hair and putting it in a ponytail; walking her to school （skipping over sidewalk cracks to avoid breaking her mother’s back）; riding in his Jeep through the fields of Millbrook as night fell, searching for deer, their eyes reflecting the beam from the giant flashlight Jay kept in the back seat for just such occasions, counting how many pairs shined back.
Then there was the singing—Jay’s highly vibrato rendition of the cheesy theme from The Swan Princess and the little rhyme he’d made up about Ellie when she needed changing: Elinor Tully Monahan the first / is the cutest little baby but her diaper smells the worst! And of course, reading The Napping House, one of their favorite bedtime books: “There is a house, a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.” Then the house would come to life with crashing, booming, screeching sounds that Jay acted out with Tony Award–worthy theatrics.