Stand Up To Cancer

On September 1, 2001, I picked my mother up at the airport in LA. Those were still the days before airport security, meeting at the gates, and bringing water on a plane from your house. When my mother walked off the plane, I said, "Mom, you really don't look good," and she replied in her inimitable style, "Well, thanks a lot!"

I said, "No, I mean, have you seen your doctor?" She went on about her doctor of 30 years and how each week as she complained about heaviness in her chest, he just kept telling her: "Your x-rays show you have COPD and if you have heaviness in the chest-- you just must be depressed. Here are some anti-depressants and another inhaler . . . go enjoy your daughter in LA."

The next morning she couldn't eat and felt very weak. I went to the computer to look up COPD and read the symptoms. They didn't seem right, so I called her doctor. He continued, "She is just depressed." I told him, "She is not eating. She is very weak. Who wouldn't be depressed?"

Frustrated, I connected with my doctor and his pulmonary specialist. On the day of her first appointment, she collapsed on the landing of the stairs to my house. I called the EMTs, although she pleaded with me to not have her go in an ambulance. But we needed help, so an ambulance it was.

To my doctor's amazement, that afternoon my mother had her first PET scan EVER!! This was a woman who never even had a cold. She never wanted to question the doctor she had for 30 years, as no one of her generation did.

On September 5, 2001, my doctor, whom I adore and had become very close to in the last years, called and told me he was coming to my home. I knew it wasn't good news. I asked him to prepare me. "Rusty, your mother has late stage lung cancer," he said. I couldn't say anything to her. She looked at me and knew it was not good news. The doctor arrived and said, "Ruth, you have a 10 centimeter lung tumor under the breast bone and it is incurable. You have about two months to live." There was silence, and he asked, "Do you have any questions?" She sighed and said, "Well, I really was expecting this news." And then my mother moved on. "I would like to tell you about my children." She began to speak about my brothers and me in the face of the worst news of her life.

My mother never went home. The four Sundays, not eight, that I was expecting her to live were filled with me getting her hair done, nails done, facials, and playing Dean Martin music. The family, children and grandchildren all flew in at different times. The Jewish holidays came and went. And then came September 11th, and we spent the next week together watching the shock around the world after two planes hit the World Trade Center. It seemed to me like everything was dying. Around the end of September, her decline was coming very fast.

As the hospice nurses worked around the clock, I sat with her and we talked and talked. She said, "You know something told me to come here to LA." It was then I told her I was planning to drop her off in Dallas and fly to New York on September 10th. If my mother hadn't been with me, I would have been in NY on Sept 11th, for an early morning appointment with my client, American Express. I always took the escalators up and the crosswalk across the Trade Center to the AMEX offices. As I held her in my arms, we both thought, what might have happened to me that fateful morning if she hadn't discovered her tumor? She was positive through it all. In our last conversation, she said that being with me through this was "an experience she would not forget, even in heaven."

The next three days, my mother fell silent as the lung cancer filled her body. We never spoke again. On October 5 at 12:35 AM, as soon as I walked out of the room, my mother passed. I guess she didn't want to go while I was in the room.

For years, September 5th had become a dreaded day for me . . . it was the day I found out my mother had weeks to live. When she died, I pledged to do everything possible to not let someone else die so quickly in the arms of their daughter or son. I would try to make a difference with this horrible disease that takes one person a minute in this country.

On September 5, 2008, my day of sadness became a day of joy. On that day, Stand Up To Cancer was born. Stand Up To Cancer's first television show was on all three networks and a group of my now best friends and I helped raise a lot of money for cancer research. And I do believe my mother had a hand in that!!! I feel her smiling down on me everyday.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I am happy. Thank you for giving me the gift to help make a difference and hopefully save someone else's mom from dying too soon.

--Rusty Robertson