Photo courtesy of Richard Cohen
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Chronically Upbeat
Secret Sicknesses
By Richard M. Cohen, October 2009
The Emmy-winning TV producer and author writes about living with a chronic illness
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Graduate school was winding down, and I shuffled onto the elevator at Rockefeller Center for a long-awaited appointment at NBC News. "I want to make you a member of this organization," a news executive had told me the previous year. In the intervening semesters, I was beset by vision loss from my multiple sclerosis and by nagging doubts that I could cut it in the big leagues.
"You'll have to be better than everyone else," my teacher and television pioneer Fred W. Friendly had told me. "And frankly, you are not that good." (Fred had such a way with words!) His unspoken message seemed to be, "Get out of the business before your heart is broken."
The idea of a double standard and a higher bar for someone who was ill was alien to me at the time. When I shared the truth about my chronic condition at NBC that day, I watched the lights in the newsman's eyes flicker and fade to black. I never heard from him again.
My father had warned me about this when I first got my dreaded diagnosis a few years earlier. "You have to protect yourself and stay silent," he told me. "Your illness can be used against you." No, I'd argued. Potential bosses will take me on my own merits.
What could I have been thinking? Now round one had gone to the cruel world, and I had lost the stomach for a rematch. I decided then and there that my secret sickness would remain just that.
Silence echoed in my head when I pursued a producer opening on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite a few years later. I circled "no" on health forms when "yes" was the correct answer. I lied to the doctor at the company physical and faked my way through the optical exam, discreetly testing my better eye twice. I won the coveted job, joining a venerable news organization that stood for openness, accuracy, and the right of individuals to know the truth. I was launching my fabulous new career on less than full disclosure, an implicit sleight of hand. The "h" in honesty is silent, after all, and so was I.
This personal drama played out more than a generation ago. Times have changed, right? Curious to find out, I talked to Ana Beesen, who graduated from medical school in 2008, just about the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. One year of intense treatment followed, and now Ana is preparing to journey to Los Angeles for a residency in neurology. Just as I did, she faces that sea of gray, the treacherous waters of what to say and when to say it.
"I think the cancer experience is viewed as an example of character, an asset," Ana told me almost matter-of-factly. "But I am at the beginning of both my recovery and my career. I really do not know what is ahead."
Instinct tells Ana that some concerns are real. She'll encounter people who believe, with the best of intentions, that an ill person is too compromised to be treated like everyone else. She'll face the soft discrimination and set perceptions that can be hard to overcome. Cancer, especially, is a loaded word. It is "shocking to other people," Ana says. "I don't want cancer to be the only thing they think about me."
But an illness can be like a brand on an exposed part of the body. For me, there was the common misperception that my MS made me weak, more vulnerable than my colleagues. I was fighting for my professional life. Ana is not sure what to expect. "The irony is that the public thinks cancer makes a person strong, not weak," Ana says.
Then what is she afraid of? Her fears seem more complicated than my struggle for opportunity in the marketplace had been. "I am a physician," Ana explains. "I do not want a disease to define me." That, she cannot control. "Am I discreet about information? Absolutely. I want people to think of me as normal. I don't want to be the 'cancer girl.' "
Ana is facing a residency, possible further training, and then joining a medical practice or starting her own. If this ambitious young woman is seen as cancer girl, a moniker that may be difficult to shake, she too may need to be better than everyone else. That is an old story. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Richard M. Cohen is an Emmy-winning TV news producer and author. His column is published on AARP The Magazine Online every two weeks.
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