DATE: Sunday, June 1, 1997 TAG: 9706010043
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 459 lines
The loneliness hit first.
Before the fear, the questions, the grief, came such a sense of awful aloneness that at times it felt like he was shrieking into a vast wasteland.
You have cancer, they told him.
We don't have it, is what he heard. You have it.
Suddenly, local television anchorman Terry Zahn, whose face was recognized everywhere, whose voice was as familiar to Hampton Roads residents as their own, was on the outside looking in.
The man whose office was plastered with poster-sized pictures of himself in gun turrets, steaming aboard aircraft carriers, covering wars, hurricanes and inaugurations, had just had the reins snatched out of his hands.
He had a rare form of cancer that within three years claims the lives of half of those who have it. And he couldn't direct it, script it or in any way control it.
Or could he?
``Good evening everyone. I'm Terry Zahn.''
He says it every night at 6 and 11. Five days a week. Forty-nine weeks a year. If he's not there one night, viewers call the station. Where's Terry? they ask. Is he OK?
So when he missed three weeks of work in March - the longest stretch he'd been off the air since beginning his television career 23 years ago - the calls flooded in.
They continued when he returned, looking grayer, shorter and infinitely more tired.
What's wrong with Terry? Viewers wanted to know.
Eventually, he would tell them.
It all started with a backache.
His back had hurt since Christmas. No surprise. After all, he was 50 years old. Ran three miles a day. Spent his off hours lifting heavy pieces of wood for his cabinetry hobby.
Then in mid-February, he found himself lying on the ground outside Norfolk International Airport. A few seconds before, he'd been lifting his wife's suitcase. The next thing he knew, he was staring up at the sky while three strangers loaded his car.
Still in control, denying the pain, he drove himself and his wife, Jean, home, put on some comfortable sweat pants, and made it into the station to anchor both news shows.
Then he called his doctor.
Pulled muscle, the doctor said, prescribing anti-inflammatories and rest.
Three frustrating days of chair-sitting later - the first time in his career he'd ever missed working during the crucial ``sweeps'' month, when ratings help set advertising rates in the months to come - he returned to the doctor. The physician still thought they were dealing with a pulled muscle and suggested physical therapy with a chiropractor.
But Norfolk chiropractor Paul R. Temple thought it was something more.
On the X-ray, Terry's bones were translucent and thin, not the thick, bright white bones he expected of a 50-year-old man.
Something's wrong, he said. Promise me you'll go back to your doctor about this.
Terry promised. But at the time, all he could think about was the pain - not weak bones.
Some mornings, he hurt so bad he crawled to the bathroom. He slept in a chair because he couldn't lie down. His life revolved around trying to avoid the pain. And his doctor couldn't prescribe painkillers, worried that Terry might injure himself more without being aware of it.
The anchorman hadn't worked in two weeks.
Finally, Temple took matters into his own hands. He scheduled an MRI - a magnetic resonance imaging - scan of Terry's back for Friday, March 21.
That morning, Terry had reached the low point. He couldn't get off the couch at Temple's office.
``Jean, what's wrong with me?'' Terry asked his wife that afternoon. ``This is not just a pulled muscle.''
Dr. Thomas Alberico describes cancer like this:
``You're perking along fine, you have a great life, a great career, and then you're taking a shower and you feel a lump. But you're 42 years old and you're busy and the kids are playing baseball, so you don't say anything about it.
``And then the next week it's still there. And your husband says maybe you should get it checked out, and you do, and then the doctor calls and says its cancer, and you have these options, you have to make all these decisions. . .
Although Alberico is a cancer doctor, he usually isn't the one who tells patients they have cancer. By the time they get to him, they've heard it from their family doctor, their surgeon, maybe even finished a course of radiation.
But Terry walked into Alberico's office on March 24 a blank slate. That morning, he had seen his primary care doctor, who told Terry something was wrong with his blood.
``Are we talking cancer?'' Terry had asked.
``Not exactly,'' the doctor had replied.
Alberico knew Terry from their work together for the American Cancer Society. Terry had been active with the Chesapeake/Portsmouth chapter for five years, soon after his own mother was diagnosed with cancer. He was on the national advisory board, and was the leading volunteer for the society's main fund-raiser - the Relay for Life, a 24-hour walk that raised $370,000 the year before.
Just a couple of months before, Terry had been the guest speaker at a fund-raiser Alberico's office sponsored.
Now the same people he'd eaten turkey ham with in November were responsible for his life.
``I can't believe I'm here like this, Tom,'' Terry said when Alberico walked into the examining room.
``Neither can I,'' Alberico said.
As gently as he could, Alberico told Terry they were probably dealing with something a bit more difficult than a blood disorder.
That's his style. The cancer doctor learned early in his career that you don't hit patients with too much information too fast. They can't take it in, and, more important, they often don't want to know that much.
He knew from Terry's X-rays and MRI what they were probably dealing with.
The bones were pitted with irregularly shaped holes. In the old days, they used to call those holes ``rat bites.''
It looked like multiple myeloma.
Multiple myeloma is a cancer of the bone marrow - the body's factory for producing blood cells - in which the marrow manufactures too many plasma cells.
The cancer also produces cells that leach the calcium out of the bones, creating the lesions Alberico saw on the films. That's what caused Terry's back pain - when two vertebrae in his spine collapsed.
This rare cancer with no known cause is typically an older person's disease - the average age of myeloma victims is 62. It makes up less than 1 percent of all cancers, affecting about 13,000 Americans each year.
It is typically fatal. Half the people diagnosed with it live 2 1/2 to three more years.
In the past, all doctors could do was manage the disease with a combination of steroids and chemotherapy. Some patients lived years, treating it as a chronic condition. Others just a few months.
But in the late 1980s, doctors began trying stem cell rescues on myeloma patients, a dramatic yet dangerous last-resort treatment.
In a stem-cell rescue, they withdraw some of the patient's blood and strain out the stem cells - the ``seeds'' that grow into bone marrow. Then they hit the patient with horrific doses of chemotherapy to kill off the rest of the marrow and the cancer. When the marrow is gone, doctors reinfuse the stem cells into the patient, where they wend their way back into the bones and, if all goes well, begin producing healthy blood cells.
The procedure itself can be lethal, with additional risks of infection while the patient's immune system is wiped out.
But when it works, it works so well that doctors use the word ``remission'' in connection with myeloma.
Still, it was a long shot.
First, Terry had to undergo several chemotherapy treatments over the next three months to see if his cancer was sensitive to the drugs.
Alberico took some blood and sent Terry home.
Jean Zahn had defined her role as an anchorman's wife early on in the couple's 19-year marriage. Terry was the public figure, not her.
He volunteered with the cancer society and attended public events; she worked a variety of jobs, in retail, marketing, insurance sales, and she did her own volunteer work at Chesapeake General Hospital.
The two had planned on having children, building a four-bedroom house when they moved to Chesapeake 11 years ago. But between their careers, his hours and his public profile, they barely had time for each other. To bring a third person into the mix seemed selfish.
They were very much in love, yet independent. Until he got sick, she'd only been to the station once in the three years he'd worked there, and she'd never been to the Cancer Society's Norfolk headquarters.
They lived a typical suburban life. Terry cut his own grass, gardened and built things, over the years constructing an elaborate deck and polished, built-in shelves and cabinets throughout their house. Their only luxuries were Terry's dark-gray Corvette and the shelves of expensive stereo and video equipment he collected.
Their social life revolved around the neighbors in their Greenbrier neighborhood.
Just a month before, Jean and the other neighbors had been devastated to learn that one of their own, Deborah Todd, who lived just two doors down from the Zahns, had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
And now, on a cold March night, sitting next to her husband at the kitchen table, Jean learned that cancer had moved into her house.
She was terrified, but she didn't cry, taking her cues from Terry, who, to his own surprise, was calm.
The whole scene gave her a frightening sense of deja vu.
Two months earlier, her father had died of prostate cancer.
She'd spent much of that fall and early winter in Hawaii with her mother-turned-24-hour-caregiver, watching her father die.
Her mom had spent every minute with Jean's dad, cooking him special meals, cleaning him, shaving him. Sometimes their intimacy was so intense, Jean had to leave the room in the face of such powerful love.
``Your father is now my god,'' Jean's mother told her daughter matter-of-factly when Jean visited. ``Whatever he needs, I will get him.''
Now it was Jean's turn.
Could she do the same?
Once there's a suspicion of cancer, things happen very fast. Alberico's blood test showed that Terry had dangerously high levels of calcium in his blood - which could cause kidney damage or seizures.
He wanted Terry in the hospital immediately.
The doctor offered to check Terry in under an assumed name to protect his identity, but Terry refused.
``Just don't tell anyone yet,'' he asked.
For he'd already begun figuring out how he'd break the news.
Broadcast news - especially anchoring - is a performance-based medium. Anchors are judged not just on how well they report and read the news, but on how they look, how their voice sounds, how their personality meshes with their co-anchors and their viewers.
The very things cancer affects.
Terry met with top managers at WVEC the Monday after he was released from the hospital - just a week after the initial diagnosis.
He was blunt.
I want to come back to work, he told them, but I'm not sure I can perform up the standards I want to on the air.
We want you to try, they said.
Next was rumor control. Terry remembered when Virginia Beach's mayor, Meyera Oberndorf, was diagnosed with breast cancer the year before, publicly announcing her illness on the air.
He knew he had to do something similar; if not, the rumors would start. Terry has brain cancer. Terry has AIDS. Terry is dying.
He called the media reporters at the two daily newspapers and gave them the story. That night, during a regular staff meeting, he told the newsroom.
Jean was there, stunned by the outpouring of emotion and support from what she'd always thought of as a bunch of hard-bitten, cynical reporters.
Still, there was some concern for the show.
Could Terry pull it off?
Co-anchor Regina Mobley, who had been through cancer with her daughter eight years ago, knew she couldn't have done it. Just the idea of facing the public each night, knowing they were scrutinizing you for any signs of illness, checking the thickness of your hair, comparing notes on the shadow of fatigue on your face. No way.
She'd seen what chemotherapy had done to her daughter. The girl had thrown up for a year, months after the chemo was finished.
How could Terry maintain the energy for two half-hour shows every night? she wondered.
Senior producer Jerry Caldwell, who produced the 6 p.m. flagship newscast, wondered if Terry could handle the bumps and curves endemic in a live news show.
The producer is the anchor's lifeline to the outside world, the voice in his ear. If breaking news occurs, if there are technical glitches, it is the producer who warns the anchors, expecting them to ad-lib, insert and backpedal without alerting the audience to any problems.
Could Terry handle the unexpected if he wasn't feeling well?
Staying on the job helped some, gave some structure, some control to Terry's life that was outside the medical maelstrom his world had become.
But it wasn't enough.
About a week after his announcement to the station, Terry approached management again.
He had been scheduled to fly to Newfoundland to shoot a special series on iceberg hunters, pilots who fly over the North Atlantic looking for giant ice floes like the one that sank the Titanic. It was to have aired during the May sweeps.
The cancer had killed that project. But Terry had another one in mind.
He wanted to do a first-person series about cancer.
It was a good story, he told the editors. One that could help a lot of people, have a great impact on the community.
But there was another reason.
The series was a way to regain control of his life.
The former naval officer, who had flown in Navy fighter jets and Marine Corps Huey helicopters, tromped the beaches in Normandy with World War II veterans, posed in front of the pyramids in Egypt, now couldn't drive himself, couldn't even lift his briefcase out of the car.
The man who always prided himself on his fit body was now two inches shorter because of the compression fractures and had a pot belly under the jogging pants he wore every day.
On the set, Regina lowered her chair so she wouldn't appear too much taller than he. Still, Terry had to sit on a pillow to get the necessary lift and height he needed to control his voice.
And fatigue was ever present. He napped several times a day, Jean driving him home between shows to rest.
On the medical side, he felt like a tennis ball, bouncing back and forth between laboratories and doctors' offices, MRIs and bone scans.
Instead of being Terry Zahn, anchorman, he was now Terry Zahn, cancer patient.
But if he could go to his appointments with a cameraman, direct the nurses and technicians on where to stand, ask the doctor the same kind of questions he'd ask if he were reporting this story about someone else - maybe he could regain some of that control.
The station said yes to the idea and committed a nearly unheard-of amount of time - five segments of five minutes each to air on the 11 p.m. news during the May sweeps.
It was triple the amount of time they had ever given to any special report.
But they felt it was important, a way to reach thousands of people with a positive message.
For from the beginning, Terry swore that the series would be very positive.
It was the way he approached the cancer.
Some might call it denial. For instance, he refused to do any independent research on his disease, wouldn't even ask his doctor about prognoses and death rates. When people sent him brochures and books about myeloma, he wouldn't read them.
But Terry looked at like this: We're all going to die sometime. If this was it for him, then he wasn't going to spend his last days and months worrying about it because he didn't have any control over it anyway. He had the best doctor, using every medical technique he could come up with. It was out of his hands.
His series would not be about death and despair, he decided, but about living with cancer, surviving cancer.
Jean, an intensely private person, knew it would be torture to tell their story to thousands of people. But for Terry, she was willing to step out of the shadows into the spotlight.
Word of the series flashed through the building, reaching senior producer Pete McElveen. Just days before, he'd learned that his mother's breast cancer had recurred.
He went to his boss and asked to be named editor on the project.
Ron Messina would be the photographer. He had worked closely before with Terry and the two shared a good rapport. Messina had been slated for the Newfoundland story.
Instead of riding in a plane above the freezing seas, he would be accompanying Terry into the Kafkaesque world of cancer.
``Is this Terry Zahn?'' The older couple came up to the anchorman as he checked in at the receptionist's desk in Alberico's office.
``We're the Levys from Suffolk,'' they said.
She had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. ``No,'' her husband gently corrected. ``We have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.''
It was a typical exchange in this large, crowded waiting room.
The reception area of a cancer doctor's office is like no other doctor's waiting room. It is a place where patients and their families, there week after week for months, form close bonds regardless of income, profession or age. Where diseases and symptoms are shared as easily as recipes and family photos.
Alberico had offered to see Terry before or after regular office hours, or to bring him in through a back door so he wouldn't have to sit in the waiting room where he'd be recognized.
Terry refused. He would be treated the same as any other cancer patient, he said. His story was their story.
And through the series, he would tell it.
``Here's what I need,'' he said to Alberico's medical assistant, Deby Reed, in the waiting room. ``I'm the director, pretend Ron on the camera is me, and we're shooting what I saw the first time I was here, with you escorting me back to the treatment room.''
It was a key scene for the series, one that had to be shot after the fact, as did much of the 15-page page script he'd written.
The shooting, with more than 20 locations, would have been arduous even for someone in peak physical condition. For Terry, it was the hardest thing he'd ever done.
Essentially, he was working two jobs. Reporting, directing and producing the series during the day, anchoring the news at night.
He had two cycles of chemotherapy during the shooting. During each, a nurse attached a small black box, about the size of a transistor radio, to his belt. The drugs ran through a clear tube into the catheter surgically implanted in his chest, from there into his bloodstream.
For four days at a time he was tethered to that box - on the set, in bed, when he bathed.
And while the effects weren't as bad as he'd feared - no vomiting, little hair loss, bearable fatigue - he was still exhausted.
Shooting the series kept Terry so tired and so focused, sometimes he forgot it was about himself.
But cancer has a way of reminding you.
When it came time to edit the series, Terry was seriously ill with a urinary tract infection, one of two infections, along with pneumonia, to which he was particularly susceptible. He left most of the editing to McElveen, trusting the senior producer to take the script and create magic.
McElveen spent seven 10-hour days in the small editing booth running through the more than 20 tapes Terry and Ron had shot.
His job was not only to take the many hours of video that Terry and Ron had shot and align it with Terry's script, but to add the music, special effects and pacing that would make the series special.
When Terry saw the flashback scenes - with their slow-motion, strobed, almost colorless effects - he recognized the mood.
``That's just how it was,'' he said of the first days after the diagnosis. ``Like a blur.''
The series, ``My Race Against Cancer,'' started on Monday, May 12. As Terry sat on the set with Regina watching it cue up on the monitor, he realized instantly that something was wrong.
There was no sound.
``Audio, audio,'' Terry shouted into his microphone to the producer in the control booth. But the sound was fine in the booth.
It was a stereo/mono editing glitch. The sound could only be heard on stereo receivers.
Viewers with mono television sets - who saw the picture, but had no sound - started calling the newsroom.
The engineer jury-rigged a fix about a minute into the tape. But by then, it was too late.
Terry was furious. Devastated.
But there was nothing he could do. He'd had the best director, the best cameraman, the best editing equipment, and still, he couldn't control the final product.
When the spot finished, the producer cut to Regina, relying on her to find a graceful way out of the situation.
Somebody's in big trouble, she joked to the viewers.
The camera cut back to Terry then, who picked right up and continued the broadcast smoothly.
On Wednesday night, when the series dealt with the death of Jean's father, however, he didn't recover quite so quickly. Even though he'd written the scene, directed it in his own kitchen and lived through the event with Jean, he choked up when it aired.
Regina watched his face as the spot ran, prepared to jump in as it ended. Then she decided, no. It was OK if Terry cried on the air.
Because she knew that the audience was crying with him.
By the time the series aired, Terry had been dealing with his cancer for two months. The intense work on the program had given him time to adjust to the diagnosis, to integrate it into his life, to begin moving beyond the cancer, into some sense of normalcy.
It had also succeeded beyond the station's expectations.
Hundreds of people called the station, wrote the Zahns, dropped cards on their porch.
The audience reaction was gratifying, but not the most important thing, said executive news director Keith Connors.
``This had very little to do with ratings and everything to do with doing what's right,'' he said several days after the series ended.
``Anybody who thought Terry couldn't do it, couldn't complete the series, his work certainly proved them wrong. He's gone beyond proving them wrong.''
On the 23rd of March, I had a backache,'' Terry told the 3,500 people assembled Friday night at Sulinksi field on the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life. ``On the 24th of March, I had cancer.''
It was the largest relay in the event's five-year history, expected to raise more than $500,000 for cancer research. And it had just been dedicated to the year's most visible cancer victim - Terry Zahn.
For the next 24 hours, 190 teams of 15 people each would walk around the quarter-mile track in shifts, many wearing red sashes signifying their status as cancer survivors.
Terry, the event's master of ceremonies, put a red sash around his 82-year-old mother, cancer-free eight years after her diagnosis of lymphoma. Lorraine Zahn, ``Mom Zahn,'' as everyone called her, flies in from Wisconsin every year for the relay, bringing boxes of homemade crafts to sell for the Cancer Society.
Then Terry slipped on his own sash. Although not officially a survivor, he feels more like one every day. Most of the pain is gone. He can stand up straight, reach down and pick up things.
This week, Alberico will test his bone marrow. If he finds fewer plasma cells - a sign that the chemotherapy is attacking the cancer - he will schedule Terry for the stem cell rescue early this summer.
Standing on the field, waiting for the gunshot that would officially start the relay, Terry felt great.
Bang!
He linked arms with the region's other cancer celebrity - Meyera Oberndorf - and his mother for the first lap around the track: the survivor's lap.
The music swelled and the announcers began reading the names of the several hundred survivors at the relay.
``Maxine Albertson, John A. Aldredge III, Nancy Alexander . . . ''
The crowd surged behind Terry as he started walking, alone no more. ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
TV news anchor and cancer patient Terry Zahn has blood drawn while
sitting beneath a passage from Proverbs: ``A merry heart doeth good
like a medicine.'' It seems fitting. He worked hard to focus on the
positive in a moving series of news stories about his ordeal.
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN photos/ The Virginian Pilot
Terry thanks board members of the American Cancer Society at a Relay
for Life planning meeting in April. It was the first time many of
them had seen Terry since his diagnosis, and he was greeted with
hugs and balloons.
Terry relaxes during an off-camera moment on the set at WVEC. The
anchorman has kept working despite chemotherapy treatments, and at
times has been so weak that he couldn't lift his briefcase out of
the car.
Registered nurse Karen Pearson, left, draws blood through a catheter
in Terry Zahn's chest at Dr. Thomas Alberico's office in Norfolk.
Terry, who has a rare form of bone-marrow cancer, leaned forward to
assist her. Below, he and his wife, Jean, exchange a solemn glance
as they decide on dates and times for chemotherapy treatments.
Terry, serving as master of ceremonies, draws cheers and laughter
from the crowd Friday during the opening of the Relay for Life, a
celebration of cancer survival. This year's event, dedicated to
Terry, is expected to raise more than $500,000 for cancer research.
Long before his own diagnosis, Terry helped raise money to fight the
disease. His mother, 82, is a cancer survivor and walks every year
in the Relay for Life. KEYWORDS: CANCER PROFILE
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