CORINNE'S HOPE: As cancer spreads, prayers change

 No comments  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY CINDY LANGE-KUBICK / Lincoln Journal Star

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of a three-part series on the story of Lincoln's Corinne Weber, who is battling cancer. To see Part One of the series, click here.

Upstairs, Mommy sleeps.

Downstairs, in the big kitchen on Hillside Circle, Will Weber polishes off his second donut and washes it down with milk.

View Slideshow

The 10-year-old gets up, bouncing a soccer ball. His little sister, Tori, dawdles, her doughnut half-eaten.

"Where'd you go for dinner last night?" asks a friend of their mom's who came by to feed them breakfast before school.

"DaVinci's," Tori says.

"Did Mommy go?"

"No, she can't get up," the 6-year-old explains. "Her lips are sunburnt."

It's eight days after Easter. Mommy crawled into bed when she got home from Houston late Wednesday.

She missed the kids' soccer games Saturday.

And their piano recital Sunday.

In Houston, Corinne Weber blamed her nausea on nerves, fear of what her cancer doctor might say this time.

At home, the fear fades, but not the weakness and vomiting, the need to lean on her husband, Bill, to make it to the bathroom.

"I think maybe it's a sinus infection or an ear infection because I'm dizzy, too," she tells friends.

By Monday, she's worse. Bill dials the oncologist's office in Lincoln. Waiting for the return call, the 42-year-old banker mixes up a strawberry smoothie in the blender.

"Dr. Weber says drink this," he tells the woman he fell in love with back in high school.

"OK, Dr. Weber. Whatever you say."

Corinne is used to Bill's bossing. It's his way of trying to control the demon inside her.

Get up and walk. Get better. Take your pills. Get better. Eat that. Get better. Drink this.

Get better.

She sips, but her stomach lurches and it comes back up.

In a few hours, Bill helps her down the stairs and out to the car.

They find out why she's been throwing up, why she can't walk a straight line.

It's not a sinus infection.

February.

Cross-legged on the floor of her daughter's bedroom, she tries to convince the first-grader to hurry and get ready for school.

Above her head, on the yellow wall, is the Bible verse she stenciled when Tori was a baby.

Delight thyself also in the Lord and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart -

She has so many dreams for this girl.

For her boys, too, Will and his brother, Ethan, 12.

She made them a promise when she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer in March 2002.

I will do everything I can to beat this.

I will not let anyone take away my hope.

I won't let anyone steal yours.

That's why she didn't listen to the first doctor when he told her the odds weren't on her side.

That's why she volunteered for experimental treatment that made her hair fall out and her stomach heave.

That's why she spent 114 days away from this gray house with black shutters and everything she loves to have a bone-marrow transplant at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston last summer.

In the beginning, she prayed for nothing less than complete healing.

Time is changing her prayers.

She knows her disease is incurable. She also knows it can be controlled. That's what she prays for now. The right chemo to hold back the cancer. The one that will give her more time until a new drug comes along. The drug that will finally beat the cancer back.

But which one?

She feels like she's at a roulette table and everything's a gamble. The stakes are high: her life.

Every night she listens to her children's prayers. Tori, so innocent: "Please make Mommy's lips better."

Ethan's sunny requests: "And let Mommy live many, many years to come."

And then Will. Will, who punches at her swollen breast, angry at the demon.

"Dear God, make Mommy better, make Mommy better, make Mommy better. Amen."

Like their mother, they believe in God's miracles.

But Corinne is practical, too. Life is different now.

"Sure, I'd like to be a mom who can rollerblade with her kids, but if I can't, I can still be a mom who cuddles in bed and reads to them," she says.

A mom who sits on the floor, helping her daughter choose between red tennis shoes and black boots.

Sleepy-eyed, Tori slips on the tennis shoes. They head down the hall to the bathroom and Corinne brushes her daughter's shiny brown hair.

"What did that girl say about your hair, Mommy?"

"She said, 'You got crazy hair.'"

Tori laughs her big laugh.

"Crazy hair? You got crazy hair!"

In the mirror, the woman looks back at the girl. The physical therapist is slender, with strong legs and freckled skin that burns easily in the sun. In the summer, her blond hair turns golden. When she smiles, her hazel eyes crinkle and the dimple in her chin deepens.

She glows, her friends say. See? See the light?

Today, in baggy blue pajamas, it is hard to see how the demon has changed her body. Her right breast swollen to three times its normal size, discolored from radiation. Her left breast pocked, blood seeping from the cancer on her skin.

When she starts to feel sorry for herself, Corinne thinks about a friend's little boy with diabetes or patients with chronic pain she's treated or families who struggle with abuse.

"Everybody has something, you know what I mean? Everyone has their burden."

This is hers.

She twists Tori's hair back and catches it with a purple hair tie.

"OK, sweetie pie."

They hold hands and head down to breakfast, the girl in the ponytail, the woman with the crazy hair.

**** 

She followed all the rules.

She ate right. Went to the gym and lifted weights.

She walked, biked with the kids, did yoga. She never smoked.

Growing up, a dancer and a gymnast, she paid attention to her body. And because of her "lumpy" breasts, she had a mammogram every year, for seven years.

It always came back clear.

But the cancer hid.

A year before the diagnosis, her right breast began to ache. Hormones, her doctor said.

Then it began to swell until her bra didn't fit anymore.

That's normal, the doctor told her. Lots of women have different-sized breasts.

Finally, a brown discharge began to seep from her nipple.

Her doctor sent her to a surgeon. Don't worry, he assured her, it's an infection. It's not cancer.

One night, six months before a biopsy proves him wrong, she lies in the bathtub.

She closes her eyes. She's never been one to worry, but tonight the tears fall. What is happening? Surely the doctors know. Surely this will all go away.

But what if it doesn't? She floats in the water.

Lord, my life is yours. Whatever you want in my life, I trust you. If I have to have cancer to be bold in my faith, if I have to face death to be bold in my faith, I will -

Could she take it back?

Could she change her mind?

***** 

The news comes on a Friday. She's at work, and when she puts the phone down she can't stop shaking.

On the way home to Bill, she stops at her friend Leslie's house.

They hold each other. Then they pray.

Please, God, help Corinne. Be with her, keep her faith strong -

In some ways, those first days were the hardest.

"The diagnosis itself is like a death," Bill will say later. "The life you had before is over."

Everything changes.

Inflammatory breast cancer is rare - 5 percent of all breast cancers - and aggressive. It's hard to treat and difficult to detect because it spreads out in thin sheets instead of a solid tumor.

Tests show the cancer has spread to Corinne's lymph nodes.

Standard treatment is chemo-therapy to shrink the mass. Then surgery.

She never made it to surgery.

The chemo didn't work. Not the Epirubicin. Not the Taxotere. Not the Gemzar.

Nothing.

Early March

In the Webers' kitchen a small, dark-haired woman runs the sink full of soapy water.

Then she scrambles eggs and sticks waffles in the toaster. The kids eat.

"You've got something on your jersey, LeBron," Genenne Didier says, teasing Will.

Will touches his finger to the spot on his basketball jersey and licks it.

"Syrup."

Will is used to seeing his mom's friends in the house when he wakes up. Corinne has an army of them.

Old friends like Genenne, her girlfriend from junior high who stood up at her and Bill's wedding. Friends from work, neighbors, moms she's bonded with at soccer games, friends from Lamaze, women she sweated with in Jazzercise.

They bring meals, help chauffeur kids, clean.

In December, when Corinne found out the cancer had spread to her liver and pelvis, the "Friends of Corinne" raised money to buy the musical family a baby grand piano.

And a trio of women take turns coming over in the morning to help with the kids and give Corinne her daily shot of blood thinner.

This Monday, Corinne comes down in her pajamas and bare feet, hugging her old friend and pouring herself a bowl of cereal.

"Poor Bill was so grumpy last night," she says.

"Really?" says Genenne. "That's so odd."

They laugh.

Corinne is the sunny one. Genenne calls Bill "the taskmaster."

The boys on Ethan's basketball team were goofing off at practice last night, Corinne explains.

"Coach Weber was trying to get them to be more serious."

It's not a big deal, honey, she told him when he got home.

It's not cancer.

Dr. Joni Tilford, Corinne's oncologist in Lincoln, breaks the news.

There is no sinus infection.

An MRI reveals three tumors - breast cancer metasticized to the brain. The largest, the size of a walnut, is pressing against Corinne's cerebellum, the control center for balance.

That's what made her vomit in Houston and kept her holding onto hospital walls to steady herself.

They schedule surgery for April 23.

The news hits hard. Then, like always, Corinne moves on.

The steroids they give her to reduce swelling around the tumor make the dizziness disappear. Her appetite returns.

She wakes up at 3 a.m. and creeps downstairs for ice cream.

"You act like you're having a tooth pulled instead of brain surgery," Bill says the next afternoon when he comes home from work and finds her giggling with company in the kitchen.

"It's a simple surgery," she tells her friends, holding the MRI film up to the kitchen light. "See, it's right there."

Her friend Nancy makes signs for her hospital room. NO BP ON LEFT ARM. WASH HANDS BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT PATIENT.

Another friend, Susan, rounds up volunteers to sit around the clock during the hospital stay.

Corinne's mom and stepdad fly in from Fort Worth. An e-mail goes out to hundreds of friends, asking for their prayers.

Friday morning comes.

She puts on her pale blue sweatsuit and kisses the kids. Tori barely wakes, grumbling in her sleep.

They had prayed together the night before.

"Thank you God for making Mommy's lip better. Please make her brain better, too."

At the hospital, they shave off swatches of her new curly hair.

Her brother Kevin's old high school buddy stops by. He's a physician's assistant for the neurosurgeon.

"You've been in my prayers for the past year," he tells her. "It broke my heart when I heard we had to do this today."

Corinne's voice cracks.

"I thought when it went to my brain, I'd just give up. But I don't feel like that at all. I just feel like it's another hurdle in this crappy thing I have to go through."

It's time. Her minister bows his head.

They pray.

Corinne sleeps in the ICU bed, a 4-inch incision behind her left ear, held together with staples. Bill wakes up on the couch, his face puffy.

When the doctor came to tell him the surgery went well yesterday, Bill danced a jig on his way back to the waiting room.

Just a small one.

There are still two tumors. And more doctors coming to talk about what's next.

For two years now, their lives have been overrun with life-and-death decisions. Bill and Corinne, the couple who took weeks to pick out a stroller for Ethan and a couch for the family room.

Plaid or floral? Leather or cloth?

Bone-marrow transplant or experimental chemo?

Now this: Whole brain radiation or gamma knife?

It's their decision, the doctor says.

After the doctor, the dietitian takes her turn. What would Corinne like for breakfast?

Her stepdad pipes up from the back of the room.

"We'd like the cancer-cure diet, please."

****** 

Bill's faith took root at Ebenezer United Church of Christ, a small German-Russian parish filled with Webers.

His father, Don, sings in the choir. So did his mom, Wilma, before cancer took her.

And so does Ethan, the only child among the white-haired choir members.

Corinne taught Sunday school here.

The church is home, its domed ceiling painted pale blue and strewn with clouds, like you could look straight up to heaven.

Nine days after the surgery, Corinne is strong enough to come back. It's a special Sunday. The youth group is in charge. Ethan plays the piano, and Will carries the offering plate.

This week, like every week, congregation members give praise and petition. The kids always pull on Corinne's sleeve when the time comes. "Raise your hand, Mommy. Raise your hand."

This week, she does.

"I cannot tell you how surrounded I felt by love before my surgery. I didn't have a moment of fear."

She worries about her kids, though. She worries about their faith. She doesn't want them to blame God. God didn't cause this to happen, she tells them.

"I just want to remind everyone that God is good," she says, pink scar hidden under a silky scarf.

Their voices strong, the people answer.

"All the time."

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.