Several months ago I was standing in Jet’s pizza on a Friday night trying to convince the cashier to use my coupon that I had accidentally left on the counter when the phone rang. I saw that it was a Nashville number so I politely excused myself from the coupon convo and walked outside. The sweet young voice on the other end was a girl from the PR department at Vandy who asked if I’d ever heard of a magazine called SELF.
She went on to explain that SELF had talked with some of the doctors at Vandy and they were looking for stories for their October issue on women in cancer. The focus has typically been about breast cancer but this year they wanted to look at other cancers that women get and focus on precision medicine. She asked if it was true that I had benefitted from precision medicine and if would be willing to speak with them. I agreed. She explained that my story would have to be chosen so they may or may not call but needed my permission to give them my name. I asked if she knew my story and when she said no, I gave her the 3 minute elevator version. This resulted in her silence and I kind of felt bad because she probably just had a piece of paper with a list of names to call for permission and she may or may not have been an intern. After all, it WAS after 6:00 on a Friday night. I thanked her for calling and assured her I was doing well, thanks to her kind friends at Vandy, but I would be doing better if this pizza guy would give me a discount.
Several weeks went by and I had heard nothing so I figured either I scared the girl or they had all the stories they needed. Then, on my way back from our last scan appointment in July I checked my email and there was this one:
Hi Kimberly,
I’m Kristin Canning, a writer for SELF Magazine. I’m working on real women stories for our October cancer package, and you were referred to my editors by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. I’d love to interview you about your experience and treatments for melanoma. Would you be able to talk on the phone sometime early this week? Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thank you,
Kristin Canning
Editorial Assistant | SELF
Condé Nast | 1 World Trade Center| 37th floor
New York, NY 10007 | 212.286.3418
It looked pretty official to me. Stephen was driving and playing “name the 80’s song.” I told him that I couldn’t talk because I was busy responding to SELF magazine. We set up a phone interview for the next day. I left a work meeting early with a strategic plan to drive far enough outside of downtown Memphis to find a safe parking lot to sit in before the phone rang. I’m sure that’s what most famous people do. I think I ended up at Old Navy.
So the phone did ring and I talked to Ms. Kristin for about an hour about what went down in my life since that day in December. I gave her the fairly long synopsis of the last nearly five years and just when she thought I was finished, I would give her another dramatic detail. There was lots of “hmm, I see..” from her and “How did you feel when the treatment didn’t work?” to which most of the answers were either kind of self-explanatory or “like I was going to die” and I started running out of adjectives. I left out the squamous cell nose job incident because I felt like she had plenty of material. Somewhere near the end of the hour I looked down at my scrub pants and my steering wheel and it hit me that I was sitting in my car in a parking lot recounting details of my life that I will always wish didn’t exist to a perfect stranger in New York City on Eastern time. She had no idea how very ordinary I was and I was pretty sure that I was not magazine material. In an effort to explain this I blurted out, “Look, I live the most normal kind of life. Most people don’t know what I’ve been through and I don’t walk around telling them unless they ask. I just try to live my life, to be a mom, a wife, and do my job.” A few minutes later, we hung up and she said she’d get back with me. I asked if she was actually planning on publishing this and she said, “Oh yes, it will go in the October issue.” So that was that.
I kind of wondered what she was thinking after we hung up. I was thinking that I was exhausted and that I’m a lot better in writing than on the phone. She had asked me if I made any lifestyle changes after being diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to come up with something very profound and health-conscious-like such as only eating the seeds of Mexican turnip because you know, SELF magazine and all. But I just said, “Not really - I was not unhealthy to begin with - this came out of nowhere,” and had the vision of me walking my dog in my pajamas the night before. I’m not sure why they didn’t put me on the cover.
When I got home, Stephen asked how it went and I told him that I had no idea what I said. He then proceeded to tell me how he had told my story to someone on the phone that day and the guy asked if I was bed-ridden. I got nervous about Ms. Kristin's mental image of me as she wrote my article
so I panic emailed her a family picture, just to prove that I was upright, functional, and not overweight or whatever and that we all looked reasonably happy. She complimented me on my beautiful people and asked if she could use the photo.
There were a series of emails back and forth between Kristin and me and then another lady named Pat who had to “check the facts.” In this series of emails I learned a lot about deadlines, and editors and fact checking, but mostly that anyone who hasn’t experienced cancer has no clue. They did send me questions for clarification (see below) which I certainly clarified. I was pretty sure by the fact that they kind of got some of the info mixed up and with the tight deadline, it may not be the most accurate. I also learned that the online version would be written in my own voice so I saw this as an opportunity and I edited rewrote that one too. Either way, the story would be shared and someone needed to read it. I would have paid good money for a story like this five years when I couldn’t find one soul worse off than me that lived to tell about it.
The online version came out on my birthday. Some people would call that irony but I call it God’s timing. There could not have been a better reminder of the gift of life. Stephen was the first to find it, of course, and texted it to me. I saw the word, “lethal” and I was scared to read it. As I read it, I found myself crying for whoever that girl was, remembering that girl was me, thanking God that I was that girl, and then I went back to work. The online article was almost exactly what I had sent them. I was pretty pleased that they left the word “faith.” Five letters can speak volumes. Happy Birthday. Stick a candle in that.
The print version came out the next week with Jessica Alba wearing a swimsuit on the cover and it still makes me laugh. Me. Her. Basically twins. We watched as the article was shared over and over on Facebook by our friends, on MSN.com, and on Vanderbilt Cancer Center’s page. It was tweeted and favorited and shared by all sorts of random people. There were more kind words than I’ve ever been worthy of...all very cool, but a little weird. And, the picture. We could not have been more Southern if we tried - standing in a cotton field holding some dogs.
I guess any fear I had in putting myself out there has pretty much diminished. So much for flying under the radar. I also realized that is when it’s your story and you’ve lived it, you are very protective of the details. They matter. I’ve written things over and over about my experiences but in the hands of a stranger, my control was released to their interpretation. As I answered those questions, the details came flooding back, like the one about “setbacks.” I thought about the day that I literally could not balance to put my daughter’s smocked dress on her for church. Definitely a setback. I thought about the moment that four somber-faced doctors walked in and I could read what they were thinking. I thought about the day I told my crying son that I’d be back later that day, knowing I probably wouldn’t. But, it’s a magazine article - nobody needs to read that. The bottom line is that somebody will pick that up in the grocery store or search for positive melanoma stories on the internet and my face will pop up - smiling and holding a dog. They will need to hear what it says because it will give them hope. It may only contain part of the story and we all know the whole, but the end result is good and for those that believe, there will be no doubt how God showed up.
Next month there will be a new magazine with new articles and another gorgeous cover model. My copy will probably go on a shelf to collect some dust, and I’ll save it to show my kids one day. They know about it now but are seriously unimpressed which is just fine with me. I certainly don’t consider being in SELF magazine my greatest accomplishment. They are. And they know it.
KJ
Link to the SELF online article
*My clarification from SELF. Note that they call questions "queries" which is probably in a Fancy Nancy book and that means they are important. Also note that I was proud of my fancy colored ink but was supposed to use ALL CAPs. I apologized for this because I was working on our fifth grade project at the same time I answered the queries.
QUERIES FROM SELF: ( If you could use CAPS, that helps distinguish your answers from the original query, thanks!)
1) Correct spelling? Kimberly Jessop yes
2) You will be 37 as of October 1, 2015? No, I turn 38 in September
3) Correct that in 2010 (which month was it?) your husband pointed out a small cyst on your back? December 2010. Yes.
4) And you thought it was nothing, but still made an appointment with your dermatologist? Well, sort of. He made the appointment for me because he’s a worrier which I can also credit for my survival. But, yes, I went that day, thinking it was just a cyst and hoping it was nothing.
5) When the biopsy turned up stage 4 melanoma would it be fair to say you were dumbfounded? That’s fair. Blindsided, dumbfounded, shocked, devastated...
6) After the Interleukin-2 treatment, you started a two-year, PD-1 inhibitor immunotherapy infusion clinical trial? Yes, I failed IL2 and started the 2 year clinical trial.
7) You wold drive three hours to Vanderbilt then drive back, continuing to work and take care of our family? yes. Friends and my husband helped with drop off and pickup and meals on the days I had treatments because I was usually gone about 18 hours.
8) And your children were 2 and 5 years old at the time? yes (10 and 7 now!)
9) You did the PD-1 immunotherapy for nine months; things seemed to be going well, but you had to wait until your first scan to be sure? I was on an 8 week cycle which meant that I was scanned for the first time after 8 weeks and every 8 weeks thereafter. So for the first 2 months, I had no clue if it was working or not. My first scans showed some shrinking so it was definitely positive.
10) When your doctor called on your drive home and told you that your tumors were getting smaller, you screamed with joy? sure did. Well, I waited until I hung up the phone, because you know, not to appear too crazy. And, it’s a guarded kind of joy - everything is with cancer. You are elated with any positive progress but guarded in how long the progress will last. Always. It is still this way. Four years and 8 months later. Every time I walk out of a clear scan I know I’m not home free, just grateful that God gave me more days.
11) Being away from your family for treatment makes you wonder if what you’re doing is worth it? Never. It was always hard to leave my kids even for a day, but I would go to the end of the earth and back if that gave me one more day with my husband and kids. Have you seen them? If those faces don’t give you a reason to live, I’m not sure what would.
12) You did have a couple of setbacks, the worst being diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia? No. The pivotal moment was when the cancer had spread to my spine and paralyzed me. I knew and we all knew that if I lived it would be a miracle. I envisioned trying to care for my children in a wheelchair and knew that my career where I basically teach people to walk was pretty much over. I don’t like to depend on others so this was devastating. The neurosurgeon that did my surgery did not know the damage to my spinal cord that had been done and could not promise that I would walk normally again but it would buy me some time and relieve the pain. I remember telling God that if I survived this, He could use me for whatever He wanted. I woke up from surgery and felt my toes for the first time in a couple of months and I haven’t stopped since. (Last week I ran a 5K and got 2nd in my age group. It happened to be the 5K for the Melanoma Research Foundation that my husband and I brought to Memphis and hosted for the first time this year. We raised 42K for melanoma research - not too shabby for a first year). The CML was a complete sideshow. Yes, it’s cancer. Bad cancer. I was diagnosed with that about 6 months after my spinal tumor. I had spent 6 months trying to figure out how to walk again, so when they told me there was a drug for that, I figured the odds were a lot better than stage 4 melanoma. If God had brought me this far, He wasn’t about to fail me now. The biggest issue with getting another cancer while you are on a research drug is that you can no longer take the drug. So, I was basically left with no options to treat my melanoma tumors that were still there, but had no choice but to treat the CML. It was a very wait and see approach which also required a lot of faith.
13) As you explained to Kristin, at this point, you and your husband weren’t fazed by bad news — if cancer taught you anything, it’s that until everyone tells you there are no options, there are options? Oh we were fazed but the blow on the second cancer seems a lot softer, I guess. (And the third is even less - I was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma last year on my nose. Surgery took care of that one.) As a dear friend of mine says, you choose to “bow up or fold up” and I will always bow up. We were certainly numb that day, and probably in shock because who in the world does that happen to? But again, I was given 3 drug choices that are FDA approved to treat the CML. I hate poking, prodding. Bone marrow biopsies are horrible. Taking chemo pills for the rest of my life is not convenient, but cancer is not convenient. And, yes. I am not big on taking no for an answer. We will always look for options. The beautiful thing is that melanoma treatment has advanced so much that now there are actually options.
14) Since February of 2013, you’ve been in remission for both melanoma and leukemia and I feel so lucky. Ha! Lucky is what happens when you win the lottery. I won way more than that. I won life. I get to hold my children, watch them grow, pick them up from school, and tuck them in at night. I get to spend my days helping others and doing what I love. I get to celebrate anniversaries with my husband and hold his hand as I share this life with him. I’m not lucky. I’m honored. I believe that it is all God’s plan and I believe in miracles. I am not sure why He chose me for one, but I am grateful.
I have watched you realize what it means to be grateful. You are content and thankful for what you have most of the time. You are thoughtful and make sure that everyone around you is taken care of - you did great helping your daddy with Christmas shopping this year! Your teachers and coaches also recognize your sweet spirit and we are so proud when you are complimented on your character. You keep a watchful eye on your sister which is extra helpful for me, even though she acts like she’s annoyed. 
