Corrine's Hope: Family Gathers to bring Hope

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by cindy lange-kubick

Spring rain falls on the roof of the house on Hillside Circle.

The Weber boys are already under the covers.

They still like sharing a room, even though Ethan will be 13 in October and Will is 10. They like sleeping side by side in matching beds, covered by the bedspreads their mom made, pale blue and green like the ocean.

In March, the whole family flew to Oregon. Their Grandpa George tends a lighthouse on the coast, and everyone, even Mommy, climbed the 110 steps to the lens.

Soon, she won't be able to climb the stairs at home.

Corinne Weber discovered she had breast cancer on March 8, 2002, three days after her 40th birthday. For two years, she's clung to the hope the right treatment will let her raise Ethan and Will and their little sister, Tori, 6.

Last summer she underwent an experimental bone-marrow transplant. It went well, but the cancer was relentless, spreading from her lymph nodes to her pelvis, liver and lung.

Then, in April, an MRI showed it had metastasized to her brain, and surgeons removed the largest of three tumors.

Now it's the second week of May, and Corinne and her husband, Bill, are back in Houston, at MD Anderson Cancer Center, to decide how to treat the remaining tumors.

Gamma knife radiation could zap them and get her back on chemotherapy right away. Whole-brain radiation would take nearly two weeks, with no chemo until it's finished.

The decision is tough.

But when Bill calls home this afternoon, he tells his father that a new MRI has decided for them.

The tumors have spread.

He doesn't say how much, only that it's "pretty dramatic."

Whole-brain radiation starts tomorrow. Five days on, two days off, then five more days. A lifetime dose. One chance to kill the cancer in her head.

The news is bad, but they deal with it the way they've dealt with all the bad news these past two years - by moving on.

Bill will be home in a few days. Corinne's dad and a sorority sister from college will fly to Houston to take his place. A neighbor will bring her home.

In the meantime, friends and family hold things together here.

Tonight, Tori heads to the shower, coaxed up the stairs by her Lincoln grandpa. Papa Don, the kids call him.

Don Weber drives his old Honda to his youngest son's house nearly every day. He picks Ethan up from school when Corinne is tired. He carts Tori to dance, Will to soccer practice.

Don's wife, Wilma, died in 1997, after a second bout with breast cancer.

"Bill lost his mom," Corinne says. "He knows life isn't fair."

The phone rings at bedtime. One by one, the kids tell their mom about their day. Will won a DVD at school. Ethan had band practice.

Tori is last. "Did you forget about my dance recital?" she asks, still damp from her shower.

"You have to be home to do my hair."

n n n

Corinne worked part time after the kids came. She loved being a physical therapist, but she loved being a mom, too.

She miscarried twins after Will was born. That was hard, but the boys always told her if they would have had the twins, they wouldn't have Tori.

"We don't get to choose," she says.

She didn't choose this, either.

She hears people say their cancer was a blessing. It taught them to appreciate the small things.

Corinne already appreciated the small things.

She loved her life.

"I read these books by survivors who say 'I wouldn't change it.'"

She shakes her head.

"I would change it."

Mommy would like to be home, she tells Tori over the phone.

More than anything.

But it's important for Mommy to be in Houston, trying to get better.

n n n

It's early April. A month before the radiation in Houston.

Corinne feels good. She's wearing the jeans she got on sale at Sam's Club, her silver cross hanging over a light blue sweater.

The doorbell rings.

"Can Tori play?"

Tori has a tummy ache, but she feels better when she sees Myrena. The girls run upstairs.

When they come down, Myrena wears a shiny dance costume she found in Tori's closet.

Tori takes dance lessons, like her mom did when she was little. At Thanksgiving, the Weber kids and their cousin made up a dance routine and set it to music. They performed for all the relatives.

Mommy danced with them.

Today, Tori pushes a button on the stereo and their song bursts out. Spinning around, I got a funny feeling. Turning my whole world upside down -

Myrena twirls, then Tori.

Mommy gets up, too. They dance.

"OK, now spin," Corinne says, showing Myrena the steps. "Hold hands like a Maypole."

The little girls follow her lead, spinning and kicking.

And Mommy's feet fly, her white socks a blur, like a pair of doves, fluttering.

n n n

"Close your eyes."

The small, dark-haired woman dusts the little girl's eyelids with sparkly shadow.

Tori's red costume is in her dance bag. She's going to be an apple in her recital today, and her mom's friend Genenne Didier is helping her get ready. She's already fixed her hair, twisting it into a bun and covering it with a hair net.

Genenne and Corinne sang together in junior high. Corinne was her "big sister" when they made the cheerleading squad at Southeast High School.

After Corinne's brain surgery in April, the doctor came in to test her long-term memory.

Genenne was in the room. "How about a cheer?" she joked.

Corinne sat up in bed.

B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.

Be aggressive, be, be aggressive!

It was just a silly cheer in 1979.

Now it's what she does to stay alive.

n n n

She never felt like a cancer patient.

Until now.

The radiation wiped her out. She can barely climb the stairs at the hotel in Houston. She fell once, flat on her face. She needed a wheelchair to get through the airport.

At home, she's back in bed.

Bill picked out the mattress, high and firm. On the dressers are baby pictures of the kids, fat cheeks and fancy clothes.

She loves this room, but she never wanted to spend this much time here.

It's too much effort to go down the stairs. The steroids she took during radiation stripped her muscle.

"I miss my fat butt," she moans to her friend, Melissa Jones.

Yesterday, Bill shaved her head after clumps of hair started falling out in the tub.

She worries about him. When she asks friends for prayers, she always asks them to pray for Bill, too.

In April she sent a care package to her doctor in Houston. She slipped in chocolate for his wife and a note: "I know what it's like to have a husband with a bad back."

She knows it's tough to be the healthy one. She knows Bill has a heavy load.

"I don't want him to have to be my nursemaid," she says. "I want him to lay on the couch do the crossword puzzle and laugh at 'Everybody Loves Raymond.'"

n n n

She can feel the war inside her.

It's like she's running a marathon, except she doesn't know where the finish line is so she keeps going and going and going.

She's exhausted, but she won't stop. She can't. Not yet.

"My body is giving out," she says in July. "But my mind and my spirit are still strong."

She's waiting. Waiting for that turn in the road that says go this way.

Waiting for God to tell her enough. Waiting for God to tell her keep going.

She listens.

She listens.

n n n

Papa Don digs out the family's old baby monitor when Corinne gets home from Houston and they set it up in the bedroom.

Bill fixes smoothies and reminds Corinne to take her pills. He takes her on walks up and down the hallway outside the bedroom.

"C'mon," he whispers, standing beside the bed. "Get up."

"I can't, Bill," she tells him. "I can't."

At the oncologist's office, they discover her platelets are plunging.

Dr. Joni Tilford puts her in the hospital to figure out why. They start her on oxygen, give her a transfusion of platelets. Then another.

Her brother flies in from California. Her mom and her stepdad come from Texas.

A pulmonologist sticks a needle in her back, pulling fluid from the space around her lungs. It flows out, through a tube, filling one big bottle, then half of another, with liquid the color of cider.

"Short-term pain, long-term gain," Bill says when the doctor leaves.

Corinne makes a face.

"You are such a football player," she says.

She leans over, head resting in her hand while Bill rubs her back. "Who was the toughest kid on your football team?"

"Why?"

"I bet he couldn't take this."

n n n

Spring slips into summer.

At home, they set up a bed in the den downstairs. The oxygen tank comes with her from the hospital, a long tube snaking from the dining room.

The cancer in her lungs has spread, stealing her breath.

It's diffuse, the doctors say; it's not just in one spot anymore.

More and more, Dr. Tilford talks about quality of life. About keeping her comfortable.

She doesn't want that. She didn't go into this to be comfortable.

She wants to try everything.

So they begin a low-dose chemotherapy, and it seems to help.

The kids take swimming lessons.

Bill makes a chore chart: Make your bed. Water plants. Practice piano. Empty dishwasher. The kids can earn a dollar a day, money for treats at the pool.

Corinne and Bill are bookends of this family. They know what they want for their children. They push them to be their best.

One day at lunch, Don stops to borrow Bill's lawnmower.

Bill's dad had heart bypass surgery last winter. Everything went fine, but lately he hasn't been feeling so great.

"Ethan, I want you to go help Papa," Corinne tells her oldest son.

"Mommy. I don't want to. I want to go swimming."

"Ethan," she says. "I would like you to go because I'd like to feel like Papa's safe."

Ethan goes.

When Corinne was in college at Texas Christian University, her friends used to sit on her hands during sorority meetings. Otherwise, she wouldn't quit raising them to volunteer for things.

He'll still have time for fun when he gets back, she says.

"I think there should be a balance. Helping other people out, that's important to me."

n n n

Her platelets stabilize in late June, then they go up. Her blood counts look better.

"Praise God for a little bit of hope to hang on to," she says when the doctor gives her the news.

Ethan and Tori take tennis lessons in July. The boys both play baseball.

She makes it to Ethan's last game on an overcast Sunday. Bill pushes her in the wheelchair to watch Will's team, too.

Ethan composes a letter to send to all his mom's friends, asking them to help his youth group raise money for the Relay for Life, a cancer fund-raiser.

On the night of the relay, Bill pushes Corinne around Haymarket Park.

Two years ago, she walked the survivor's lap.

Will pokes a finger at the "Cancer Sucks" button on her shirt.

"You're right, Mommy," he says. "You're right."

n n n

She is climbing the stairs, chasing the kids up to their rooms. "Look!" Corinne yells down to her mom. But her mom doesn't see her.

She dreams of food, too. Biting into crunchy apples, cold ice cream slipping down her throat.

She is buying Ethan new jeans for school. She is watching Tori swim, yelling at her to be careful.

Her hands grasp the air and her feet run in place, words tumbling out through the thick blanket of sleep.

When she wakes, she hordes her energy. Then she spends it. Coloring with Tori. Listening to Ethan play the piano. Watching Will pose in his new football helmet.

The kids are her cheerleaders.

And everyone follows their lead.

In May, her mom and stepdad took a cruise for their 25th wedding anniversary. Corinne jokes that they lit a candle for her in every cathedral in the Mediterranean.

A friend's niece came back from France with a bottle of holy water from Lourdes. Corinne drank it to please her.

Tapes show up at the house. "From Surviving to Thriving." "The Cancer Video."

Friends cook meals. They come to the house and sit with her while Bill works. They call the kids over to play.

At night they take turns sleeping beside her, rubbing lotion on her hands, helping her to the bathroom, praying.

She calls them her angels.

But there's a limit to what angels can do.

She's come to believe something: This is between her and God.

n n n

She can't look.

It's the second week of August, and 80 milligrams of Doxil drips out of a plastic bag into her body.

"The red devil," she calls it.

Another weapon to fight the demon inside her.

Bill brought her to the doctor's office, to the big room with the blue recliners where they give the chemo.

She wanted to come.

She doesn't want to quit fighting, but she's afraid. What if her body can't take it?

She's cold, and Bill settles a pair of quilts over her lap.

When the kids were little, she'd have them drape their pajamas over the heat vents in the winter. After their showers they'd run to put them on, nice and toasty.

n n n

Tori Mae turns 7 on the second Saturday in August.

Mommy can't make it to her swimming party. But at night they have Famous Dave's at home and open presents in the living room. Papa Don comes, and Grandma Sheila, Corinne's mom.

Uncle Kevin's present came from California, wrapped in a brown cardboard box.

When she jiggles it, it talks.

There's a present from her great-grandma in New York. One from Mommy and Daddy.

Ethan and Will carry in a big sack.

Tori reads the card.

"Have fun being 5."

It's a Daddy joke. On her fifth birthday he told her she was growing up too fast, and he made her promise she'd always stay 5.

Later, Papa Don lights seven candles on the chocolate cake Tori helped her grandma bake.

They sing in their loud Weber voices.

Everyone claps.

Mommy smiles. A wide smile that wrinkles her nose and lights her hazel eyes.

n n n

At night she holds her babies close and whispers prayers in their ears. She's always prayed with them. Each night and in the mornings before school.

For two years, she has prayed for their faith to be strong.

She used to pray to be weak so she would have to depend on God.

Now she is weak.

She has so much time to think and to pray.

She thinks about Tori, her growing girl. Will, getting ready for midget football, his dream since he was old enough to hold a ball. Ethan, nearly a teenager, outgrowing his clothes.

She holds on to small moments. She holds on to hope.

God knows her heart. He has carried her this far.

She closes her eyes in the quiet of the house on Hillside Circle.

And she listens.

She listens.

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