“Two mantras that play over and over in my head: ‘nothing lasts forever’ and ‘at least I’m moving forward.’”
—ISABELLA DE LA HOUSSAYE, ENDURANCE ATHLETE
Not every story we cover is “breaking news” and not every event commences with racing to the scene in the live truck. I’m not always approaching people after a natural disaster with my microphone or sidling up to their hospital bedside. Some of the stories that have stuck with me the longest are those that feature people who are battling serious illness. People who are struggling with pain and uncertainty and wondering if they will live to see next spring, or their first grandchild, or first grade. People whose courage and grit inspire our viewers as they face their own challenges.
Featuring a person with cancer in a news story means we cannot offer viewers a conclusion. There will be no arrest, no police investigation, no jury verdict. No one to blame for the victims’ anguish. The attacker in these stories can only be seen under a microscope but is as insidious and evil as they come.
People have different motivations for speaking with us as they fight their own health battles. They may be leveraging the media attention to raise awareness for their particular disease. Or they may hope that by publicizing their struggle, they will get the treatment they need. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly highlighted that access to quality health care is neither equitable nor fair. Occasionally, I can help tip the balance, to shine a light on a person’s medical predicament and expedite their care. The flip side of this is, how many people’s stories am I missing? How many people are suffering in the shadows, with no reporter to listen or intervene?
I am honored to introduce you to two people who epitomize what it means to triumph over cancer. After profiling them for the news, I periodically googled their names and searched for them on Instagram, hoping to find some update. As the search results were revealed, I prayed that I would not find an obituary. The links that appeared when I searched for their names didn’t give me the update I craved, but with no results from Legacy.com, I at least felt confident that they were well.
Seven-year-old Gisselle Bonilla glanced over at her grandmother, who was crying. She was on the phone with Gisselle’s mom in the United States. Gisselle had only been half listening as she watched TV on the couch, but she knew they were talking about Yarelis, Gisselle’s little sister, whom she knew only from photographs and occasional phone calls. Gisselle loved Yarelis in the same way she loved Santa Claus—as a person she had never met, wasn’t quite sure was real, but adored nonetheless.
It was October of 2011, more than six years since Gisselle had last seen her parents. She had stayed behind with her abuela in El Salvador when her mom and dad moved to the United States. Gisselle was only nine months old when her parents kissed her goodbye. Maria and Dagoberto Ramirez wanted to move to New Jersey and find work before sending for their daughter. A year after they moved to America, Yarelis was born.
Gisselle’s life in the city of San Salvador was full and happy—her aunts and uncles lived close by and came to visit often. When she wasn’t in school, she helped her abuela in the kitchen and played outside with her friends in their Colonia Maquilishuat neighborhood. The tropical flowers on her street and the mountains rising up behind the apartment buildings formed the backdrop of her childhood. She missed her parents, or at least the idea of her parents, especially when she saw the other girls holding their fathers’ hands on the way to the grocery store or hugging their mothers at the park. But she loved her abuela and felt safe with her.
“I was a baby when my parents left for America, so all I ever knew was my abuela,” Gisselle explained to me.
After Abuela hung up the phone, she walked over to Gisselle and sat down next to her on the couch.
We need to pray for Yarelis, she said, putting her arm around her and drawing her close. And we need to pray that you can go visit your sister so you can help her.
Neil Mullin walked into Bluestone Coffee in Montclair, New Jersey, shortly after it opened. He was meeting up with some attorney friends before heading off to his own law practice that he shared with his wife, Nancy. He sauntered past the enormous antique coffee grinder on display and headed to his regular table, the one the wait staff referred to as A1.
Mr. Neil, good morning! Forty-four-year-old Gertrudis Ramirez greeted him warmly, recognizing his loyal customer as soon as he entered the café. The two men had known each other for more than a decade.
Gertrudis! How are you today? What do you have planned for Thanksgiving? Neil asked.
Dinner with the family, lots of cooking. Let me get your coffee, Gertrudis said, before turning toward the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later and handed Neil the steaming mug. He took orders from the other lawyers around the table and then tapped Neil on the shoulder.
Mr. Neil, can I talk to you for a minute? Alone? Gertrudis gestured away from the table.
Neil pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. Sure, Gertrudis; what’s up?
Gertrudis had been debating whether to ask Neil for help, and now he felt vulnerable, exposed. He had been serving Neil coffee for years, but their conversations had rarely extended beyond casual pleasantries.
Gertrudis took a deep breath and said, It’s my granddaughter, Yarelis. She is very sick.
Oh no, I’m so sorry. What’s wrong? Neil asked.
She has leukemia, blood cancer. She’s only five years old and it’s serious. She’s been in the hospital. Gertrudis could feel his voice cracking, his emotion welling in his throat. He had been visiting Yarelis most days on his way home from work. She seemed to be getting weaker, the color slowly draining from her face.
Gertrudis explained that Yarelis’s only hope for survival was a bone marrow transplant. The entire family had been tested, and the only person who was a perfect match was her older sister, Gisselle. Trouble was, Gisselle lived in El Salvador, and the US government had denied her a tourist visa. Twice.
I will do everything I can to help you, Neil said. I have a friend who writes for the newspaper. You should talk to him, get her story some attention.
Please hurry, Gertrudis implored. We’ve been waiting three months already and we don’t have much time. He feared that Neil was his last hope, his only hope to save Yarelis. Nothing else was working.
Neil sat back down at his table to continue his conversation with his friends. All through the day, he turned over the facts of Yarelis’s case in his head and wondered how a government that prided itself on being compassionate and inclusive could deny a seven-year-old girl entry into the United States out of concern she might overstay her tourist visa.
Dr. Peri Kamalakar had already written a letter to the State Department in the fall of 2011, imploring them to let Gisselle into the United States. “I told them, Gisselle needed to come in or Yarelis would die,” he remembers. After more than fifty years treating children with cancer at Newark Beth Israel Hospital, Dr. Kamalakar knew that a bone marrow transplant was Yarelis’s only hope for survival. She had acute lymphocytic leukemia, a uniquely aggressive form of the disease.
After discovering that none of Yarelis’s relatives in the United States were suitable donors, Dr. Kamalakar had arranged for Gisselle to be tested. A cheek swab revealed that she was a perfect match. Perfect, except that she was 3,400 miles away in El Salvador. Even that was a stroke of luck, as not every sibling is eligible. The prospect of finding a nonrelative donor in time from someone already in the United States was close to impossible.
“She was an unusual case, a rare case of this type of cancer,” Dr. Kamalakar remembers. “So many other patients I had with this cancer aren’t here anymore because they died.”
When I first met Yarelis Bonilla in late November of 2011, she was five years old and had been given a 25 percent chance of survival. The preschooler had endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Her immune system was so weakened that it was no longer safe for her to be around other children. When she wasn’t in the hospital or at a doctor’s appointment, she was home with her mother, Maria.
I would love to take credit for sourcing this powerful story, but the reason I was sitting in their Elizabeth, New Jersey, living room on that cold fall morning was because of Bob Braun from the Star-Ledger. Braun had been a reporter for fifty years for New Jersey’s largest newspaper. My favorite columns of his were ones where he had uncovered some absurd bureaucratic red tape that was standing in someone’s way, when he investigated a complete lack of common sense in government. He focused on people and their stories, his humanity and decency coming through in every word.
Neil Mullin’s wife, Nancy Smith, is a top employment and civil rights lawyer in New Jersey and had been a friend and legal expert quoted in Braun’s column for years. After hearing from Neil about Gertrudis’s plight involving his granddaughters, Nancy decided to call Braun and pitch him the story.
“She said, ‘Bob, you’ve got to do this now,’” Braun recalls. “It was the day before Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t going to wait a week. There was no question I would write the story immediately, once she explained everything.”
What Nancy explained was that after Gisselle was twice denied a tourist visa from the US Embassy in San Salvador in 2011, the family was running out of options. They briefly considered flying Yarelis to San Salvador to do the bone marrow procedure there, but Dr. Kamalakar strongly opposed it. The family also lacked health insurance and wasn’t sure they could afford to pay for the procedure in Central America. Yarelis’s mother, Maria, was doubtful she would be allowed entry back into the United States if she left.
Braun met with Gertrudis at Bluestone Coffee, and the two men spoke for more than an hour. Braun then arranged to go with a newspaper photographer to see Maria and Yarelis, who had returned home from the hospital. He worked through Thanksgiving weekend, and his story was published that Monday with the headline “Strict US Immigration Laws Ignore Life-and-Death Decisions in Case of Ill Elizabeth Girl.”
That morning, when I was trying to figure out what story to pitch to my managers at Eyewitness News, I was scanning through the local newspapers in New Jersey for ideas. It was quiet, the Monday after a holiday weekend, and there was no obvious breaking news or major news conference planned. On days like this, I might make phone calls or send emails to sources—police chiefs I know, or town mayors, or state agency employees. I would read through some of the national headlines and see if there was a way to cover the story in our community. But mostly, I would peruse the local newspapers, where the newsroom staffs dwarfed our own and where reporters covered stories that we didn’t know existed. They seemed to be everywhere, with outstanding sources on virtually any topic and exclusive tips on the political and education beats in New Jersey. I was admiring and even a bit jealous when I would see that the Star-Ledger or the Bergen Record had scooped us again.
The Star-Ledger of Newark, with its newsroom of almost two hundred people, was a jumping-off point and an endless source of ideas for slow news days. Sadly, the resources and reporting advantage that the Star-Ledger had in 2011 have been diminished in the last decade like so many other local newspapers. In 2013, the storied newspaper cut 10 percent of the newsroom staff, and in 2014, another 25 percent were laid off. By April 2020, the newsroom was less than one-third of the size it was in 2005, when Star-Ledger reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the resignation of Jim McGreevey after the governor announced he was stepping down after having an extramarital affair with a man.1
The first line of Braun’s column that November day grabbed my attention: “Here’s the choice: Strict enforcement of immigration laws or the life of a little girl.”2 The photo that accompanied the article showed Yarelis, unsmiling, looking directly into the camera as she sat on her mother’s lap. Something about her direct eye contact made her appear intense and wise for her years. Her small head was completely bald, a sign that even the harsh chemotherapy was not working well enough to help this beautiful child.
I stared at the photo and considered that Yarelis was the same age as my son, who had just turned five the month before. I saw the determined expression on her mother Maria’s face in the photo and recognized the fighter instinct that all of us mothers have when our children are in danger. Yarelis’s grandfather Gertrudis’s words echoed exactly what I was thinking:
“It’s hard for me to believe this country would not want to save the life of one of its own children,” Gertrudis told Braun. “This little girl is an American.”
A couple of phone calls and web searches later, the Eyewitness News assignment desk was directing a photographer and me to the Ramirez family apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey. When I showed up at their door, I was reminded, once again, that I really needed to learn Spanish. I put a bilingual friend on speaker phone and asked her to explain our request to Yarelis’s mom. Maria welcomed us inside with a tired smile and motioned for us to sit on the couch.
Once inside, I was faced with one of the challenges of reporting on kids: how to build a story around a child who doesn’t have much to say to the strange adult with the microphone. Yarelis gave me and the photographer a big smile when we entered the family’s living room with bright teal-colored walls, but she didn’t say much.
Reviewing now how the interview was shot, I cringe when I see that I wasn’t wearing a mask. It would have been unthinkable in 2011 (where would I get one of those things?), but in the post-COVID world, watching myself talk at close range to a child with late-stage leukemia without covering my nose and mouth seems anachronistic, a relic from another time.
I moved to sit next to Yarelis on the reclining chair and watched her draw as the photographer started shooting video. She sketched a little girl in a dress standing under a rainbow. The girl had long, flowing hair.
“Who’s that?” I asked Yarelis.
“That’s me!” she exclaimed with a smile. My heart felt heavy with emotion, and my eyes began welling up. I swallowed hard and gazed up at the ceiling to suppress my tears.
“What a beautiful drawing!” I managed to say. “What else do you like to draw?”
She continued sketching with her orange pencil, her eyes narrowing as she focused intensely on her work. As she grew more comfortable with me, she pulled out school workbooks and picture books to show me what she was learning. Despite everything I knew about the gravity of her illness, I marveled at how alive she was.
I needed to understand more about Yarelis’s condition, so I stepped into the hallway to call the family’s immigration attorney, a young woman named Mariam Habib with the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee. Habib had gotten involved after Braun called the tip line, explaining the details of Yarelis’s predicament. She begged her supervisors to let her take the case pro bono.
“Tourist visas are routinely denied,” Habib explained. “They likely saw that half of Gisselle’s family was already here in the US and figured there was no way she would go back to El Salvador.”
Habib arranged to meet for an interview later that day in Newark, and she also agreed to translate for Maria and me on speaker phone. I cursed myself (again) for not learning Spanish in high school, and years later I would spend months studying on Duolingo, making sure I would not feel so helpless again.
Maria explained that her daughter Yarelis had been a healthy child until late 2010, when she started getting fevers. The frequent fevers felt so hot that Maria would draw her hand back from her daughter’s forehead as though she had been burned. One particularly bad night, her forty-pound child recorded a fever of 106 degrees. Yarelis would go to the doctor, take Tylenol, get better, and then the cycle would start over again. Within a few months, Yarelis had been diagnosed with leukemia. When the chemotherapy started, the little girl was so weakened she could barely move.
“I was crying and crying and then I can’t walk,” Yarelis explained that night when her story aired on Eyewitness News. She added that while she was at the hospital, she liked to eat pizza and go to the playroom. Important details that any five-year-old would want you to know, all conveyed in her clear and confident little voice.
“No se siente bien estar esperando,” Maria explained on TV that night. It doesn’t feel good to have to wait. I nodded in agreement. I may not have understood every word she was saying until it was translated, but I innately felt her anxiety as a mother.
After about an hour, we were finished speaking with Maria and interviewing Yarelis. We started packing up our camera gear to leave.
“Yarelis, it was so nice to meet you!” I smiled at her. The sallow color of her skin hinted at the disease her body was fighting, but her dark brown eyes were sparkling and full of life. We walked out the door and I took one last look back at her and said a silent prayer for this precious little girl.
We wound up going live that night in Newark at Gateway Plaza outside the office of US senator Bob Menendez. Menendez had gotten involved after hearing Yarelis’s story to try to pressure the Obama administration to grant Gisselle a ninety-day tourist visa. He and Habib were incredulous that the US government—which grants thousands of visas to Salvadoran people every year—couldn’t grant one more for Gisselle.
“This is not some child that is going to come here and stay forever; this is a child that is going to come here to save a life,” Habib noted.
“I hope that common sense will prevail,” Menendez added.
In my live shot at the end of the story, I reported that doctors wanted to do Yarelis’s bone marrow transplant two months later in January, but it was unclear if the immigration hurdle would be cleared by then. I went home to my family that night to eat Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner. I thought only of Yarelis as I drifted off to sleep.
Bob Braun’s column appeared Monday morning, and my story aired Monday night. By Friday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Department had reached an agreement to allow Gisselle to travel to the United States under so-called humanitarian parole. Mariam Habib remembers getting a call at six a.m. that day with the good news.
“I was shaking I was so happy,” she remembers. “Humanitarian parole applications can take six to twelve months. I called Gertrudis to tell him. It was his refusal to give up that really helped in this case.”
Senator Menendez scheduled a press conference for Friday night at Newark Beth Israel Hospital to announce the good news.
The girls’ grandfather was elated. “I am grateful to the Star-Ledger for all it has done for my family,” Gertrudis Ramirez told Braun. “Yarelis will live.”3
Dr. Kamalakar appeared at the news conference and spoke with a big smile about Yarelis’s much-improved chance of survival. Finally, he could treat his patient properly without worrying about US immigration restrictions.
Later that weekend, when Dr. Kamalakar went to read Braun’s articles in the Star-Ledger, he perused the comment section online. It was a mistake. While most people applauded the decision to allow Gisselle into the United States, there were several comments that he will never forget.
“They were asking, ‘Why are you bringing this girl here? It’s costing so much money. We should treat our own children.’”
Seeing Yarelis and Gisselle cast aside as outsiders or interlopers cut deep for Dr. Kamalakar. He spent his five-decade career at Newark Beth Israel Hospital, where his patients routinely were not able to pay for their treatment. In the early 1900s, the hospital itself had been a haven for Black and Jewish doctors who were denied admitting privileges elsewhere. Seeing the vitriol directed at the Ramirez-Bonilla family hearkened back to Dr. Kamalakar’s childhood in India.
“Discrimination is human nature. I used to think it was only in India, where I grew up with the caste system. But it’s here in America too.”
On December 23, 2011, Maria, Gertrudis, and Yarelis stood by the baggage claim at Newark Liberty Airport. Yarelis was carrying her favorite Rapunzel doll and was moving excitedly through the terminal in her tiny cowboy boots. A denim bucket hat covered her bare head so she wouldn’t get cold. When Gisselle came walking toward them, Yarelis approached her, hesitated for a moment, and gave her a huge hug. Gisselle stepped back and stared at her sister, as if she was checking to see if she was real. The strobe lights of camera flashes illuminated the moment, which would be broadcast on TV that night and featured in newspapers the next morning.
“That was my Christmas that day,” Gertrudis remembers.
Everyone was crying as they watched the two sisters who had only seen each other in photos and had only heard each other on the phone meet for the first time. Gertrudis embraced his granddaughters and told reporters in Spanish, “I have high hopes for the surgery. The hardest part was bringing Gisselle over.”4
The family reunion was the outcome Gertrudis had been praying for. He silently thanked God as he scooped up the two girls in his arms. By the time the family car pulled up to the apartment in Elizabeth, Yarelis and Gisselle were talking and giggling as if they had never been separated.
One month later, the girls would be bonded by more than just their shared genetics. Doctors would extract bone marrow from Gisselle’s hips and transplant it into Yarelis, the healthy stem cells charged with fighting the leukemia. Yarelis stayed at Hackensack University Medical Center for close to six weeks to recover and then returned home to her mother and sister.
As the weeks wore on, Gisselle missed her abuela in El Salvador. She missed playing outside in the bright sunshine and felt cooped up in the Elizabeth apartment in winter when the sun set before five p.m. By March, Gisselle and the girls’ father were on a flight back to San Salvador, just as the family had promised immigration authorities. Yarelis cried and cried for Gisselle, not understanding why the person who not only saved her life but also brightened her life had to leave.
The transplant was a resounding success. In September of 2012, Yarelis was starting kindergarten with the other children. Her curly black hair was growing back and she could run and jump and keep up with all of the other children. Maria and the rest of the Ramirez family thanked God for the miracle of her recovery and remembered Gisselle in every one of their prayers.
The first thing I noticed was her hair. As her end of the Zoom call came into focus, I was struck by the thick, dark brown hair cascading past her shoulders, down her pink shirt, and out of the bottom of the frame. It was the most beautiful hair I had ever seen—not just because of how it looked, but also because of everything it represented. I leaned in, peering closer at my computer screen at the child I had not seen in nine years. I wished that COVID restrictions had not constrained our reunion to two screens, but in February of 2021 this was the only safe way. “Yarelis!” I exclaimed. “I’m so happy to see you! And look at your hair!”
When I started searching for Yarelis for this book, I was afraid about what I would find. Afraid that the day I walked out of her apartment would be the first and only day I would see her. That her bright spirit might not have been able to prevail against the rare and aggressive cancer. I tried googling her but didn’t find anything after 2012. And a search for her mom, “Maria Ramirez” in Elizabeth, New Jersey, yielded hundreds of names. On Neil Mullin’s advice, I drove to Bluestone Coffee in Montclair and left a note for Gertrudis, explaining I was working on a book project and was hoping to speak with Yarelis. When he called me back to tell me Yarelis was a happy, healthy eighth grader, I was elated.
The first time I spoke with Yarelis on the phone, I reminded her of the self-portrait we featured on the news and asked her if she still likes to draw.
“I love art class, any kind of art. Mostly drawing, but next year in high school I want to try other things, like sculpture.”
Yarelis told me she doesn’t remember much about her cancer battle—just small details like watching SpongeBob during her long stays at the hospital. She said returning to school after being kept home for so long was jarring, and her strong, confident voice that we featured on the news softened and grew quieter. She told me she loves animals and recently rescued an injured pigeon she found at a nearby park. The pigeon’s wing was broken and Yarelis nursed it back to health, housing the female bird in a shoebox in her bedroom and naming it Panchita. She wants to be an animal control officer when she gets older, to advocate on their behalf and to be their voice.
Three months after we reconnected on Zoom, New Jersey was opening up again. I followed up with Maria to see if she would allow me to visit Yarelis in person. I had a few more questions and I was elated at the prospect of seeing the family after so many years. On a sunny spring afternoon in May, my research assistant Paola and I climbed the stairs up to their third-floor apartment, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Maria answered the door and welcomed us inside, explaining in Spanish that the girls would be back shortly. Paola translated (my Spanish is better, but still not great) and we made small talk until the door opened a few minutes later.
Yarelis came in wearing a tie-dye SpongeBob shirt (he’s still her favorite), and a taller teenager with the same beautiful long, wavy hair walked in behind her. Yarelis had mentioned her on the phone, but I had to see her to believe it.
“This is my sister, Gisselle,” Yarelis introduced us. After all those years, after all the heartache and the drama, the sisters were living together again. I marveled at the two teenagers in the same room. I took their picture on my phone and texted it to their immigration lawyer Mariam Habib. “Means the world to me!” she wrote back with a heart emoji. Like me, she also wondered over the years what had become of Yarelis and Gisselle. She never forgot either.
As much as Gisselle wanted to go home to her abuela in El Salvador after the transplant, she realized once she was back that she missed her mother and sister. The weekly phone calls and eventually FaceTimes were no longer sufficient, now that she knew what it was like to hold her sister’s hand and feel her mother’s embrace.
At age twelve, Gisselle moved even farther away when her father came to take her out of San Salvador and up to the rural mountain town of Ilobasco to live with her great-grandmother. She felt lonely, and more than anything, she wanted to be back in the United States, back where she could be with the one person she felt more connected to than anyone else in the world. She wanted to be with Yarelis. It took seven years to get the right paperwork, but Gisselle finally came back to New Jersey in 2019 at the age of fourteen. She’s working to improve her English and is enrolled at the local high school. The sisters seem to have a secret language of gestures and glances that reflect their unique bond.
“We are so happy to be together again,” Yarelis says. Nine years after she saved her sister’s life, Gisselle is finally home.
In the early spring of 2020, as COVID forced our society into lockdown, I was anchoring at NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, trying to digest and then report on news conferences where the governors of New York and New Jersey had to announce the deaths of hundreds of people every day, victims of this mysterious and terrifying new virus. In between the eleven a.m. and five p.m. broadcasts, I started interviewing people for news stories remotely on Zoom, a first in my career. No more knocking on doors, or sitting in people’s living rooms, or hugging them at the end of an emotional interview. Just two faces on a screen, hoping the connection wouldn’t glitch at the most important part.
My most memorable Zoom story involved a doctor from Queens who was believed to have contracted the virus from one of his patients in March of 2020, before masks were widely available and before the full catastrophic extent of the virus was understood. He was clinging to life on a respirator in a Manhattan hospital. His adult sons contacted our newsroom in mid-April, asking for coverage so they could publicize their request for an experimental treatment that they believed could save their dad’s life. I interviewed them on Zoom one Saturday night, their story so compelling and yet somehow distant. I never met the brothers in person, never had a chance to get to know them during the conversation that always happens before and after the camera rolls. Our interaction was confined to a screen, and through the photos of their dad that they emailed me after we spoke.
The story that aired that night wasn’t of a lower quality than anything else I’ve worked on. I would like to think that perhaps it played some small role in getting their dad the Remdesivir treatment they had advocated. Within days, he was off the respirator and within months was back at work as a physician. From a business standpoint, the news story that aired was incredibly efficient for the station. I was already anchoring the evening broadcasts, so they didn’t need to hire another reporter to go to Queens or Manhattan or Westchester County to interview the family. They didn’t need to pay a photographer to shoot the interview, and they didn’t need to pull the live truck out of the garage. The president of NBC News alluded to this streamlined newsgathering when he was interviewed in March of 2021, saying, “I think the days of sending a full camera crew to grab what will ultimately be a 12-second bite for a ‘Nightly News’ piece are over.”5
The doctor’s family elected not to participate in this book, a decision that I certainly respect. But I wonder if part of their hesitation was because we failed to make an authentic connection. Everything was so sterile and distant, all done with a few clicks of a keyboard. I worry that these Zoom stories will continue long after lockdowns are lifted. They are a useful alternative, but not a substitute. I think we lose something as a community when we don’t report stories in person. We simply aren’t getting the full picture when we aren’t stepping into your world, just seeing a slice of it through your screen. Local news is an intimate business, one that I believe requires a human touch.
Isabella could feel the pressure building in her chest. It started aching not long after they left Florida and had been getting progressively worse as they pedaled north toward Washington, DC. Now that they were within one hundred miles of the Capitol, the pain was intense. Every bump reverberated in her sternum, sending intense waves of pain through her body. It took everything she had to keep biking, to keep up with her husband, David.
Fifty-six-year-old Isabella de la Houssaye had already pedaled from San Diego, California, to St. Augustine, Florida, a 2,300-mile cross-country adventure that had taken forty-five days. She and David had set out on their trip from Southern California on March 10, 2020. Within days, their itinerary of speaking events and group rides all collapsed under the weight of COVID restrictions. What was supposed to be a publicity-filled bike tour to raise awareness about lung cancer turned into a more solitary pursuit for the couple—a personal challenge and a way to spend precious, uninterrupted time together. They stayed with friends when possible and camped outside some nights to avoid the threat of the virus in crowded hotels. They had been married almost thirty years, had raised five children, and each wondered if it would be their last summer together.
By the time they biked into Washington, DC, that summer, Isabella’s lung cancer had spread to her skin, a rare complication that resulted in a painful, blotchy rash. By September of 2020, she was back in treatment for stage 4 lung cancer, accompanied this time by skin cancer treatment as well.
“I don’t think of myself as sick, and I don’t function as a patient,” Isabella explains. “Living with cancer is an inconvenience, but it’s not on my mind all the time.”
“I don’t believe it,” my friend said to me from across the anchor desk. “I don’t see how this is possible. It’s not possible.” We were working during Thanksgiving weekend 2018, almost seven years to the day after Yarelis’s story aired.
“I went to her house! I spoke with her in person. We went for a jog together. I’m telling you, it’s true,” I insisted.
“It seems far-fetched. How could she be doing all this with terminal cancer? Are we going to be doing a follow-up story a year from now about how this is a scam?” She still was not convinced. Decades of local news coverage can have this effect—for as many crazy stories as we have reported on, you still wonder if the astonishing ones are real. A reporter’s skepticism is incredibly useful in ferreting out lies that people occasionally try to tell us. But in this case, the story was 100 percent accurate.
Isabella de la Houssaye’s cancer journey defies everything you think about this deadly disease. Just take what you think someone with cancer would do and imagine someone doing the opposite. What Isabella has accomplished with terminal cancer is more than most healthy people could achieve in a lifetime. My friend was right—it does seem impossible.
“I had lung surgery last week, and tomorrow I’m doing a marathon,” Isabella told me the first time we reconnected in February of 2021.
“You’re doing a marathon?” I asked. A conversation with Isabella involves quite a few of these moments. Stop, rewind, replay the tape. I am constantly asking her clarifying questions. Did I hear that correctly?
“Well, I’m not running it. I’m walking a marathon tomorrow,” she explained.
Walking 26.2 miles less than a week after several lung tumors were removed from her body. She still had the stitches in.
“Does anyone—your doctors, your family—even try to stop you from doing these physical challenges anymore?” I asked.
Isabella laughed. “No, they stopped doing that a while ago. They know that this is what makes me happy. What you put in your mind matters. I think of myself as a well person.”
Isabella’s story came to me in the fall of 2018 in the form of a press release. I receive dozens of press releases every day in my email inbox. They are written by public relations (PR) professionals whose clients are interested in promoting their brands. It could be a consumer product, an expert on a story in the news, or a community event. Their goal is “earned media.” Instead of paying thousands of dollars for an advertisement, PR firms try to get their clients in the news for free as part of a newspaper article, website feature, or interview segment. We get content to fill our shows, and they get valuable exposure. Only a fraction of the press releases result in a broadcast story, but they make up an important part of our news ecosystem. The PR firms we collaborate with in local news are especially adept at highlighting community feature stories: chefs from restaurants, doctors for health segments, and small businesses with unique products. The caveat in all this is that hiring a PR firm costs money, so newsrooms miss out on people who have a story to tell but can’t afford the representation.
The press release I received in the fall of 2018 was about the Ironman World Championship triathlon in Kona, Hawaii, and there was one competitor who stood out from the rest. “Athlete with Stage Four Lung Cancer Will Compete in Ironman Triathlon,” the subject line read. I skimmed the news release and then read it more carefully again, shaking my head with admiration. I had run two half marathons in my life, a mere 13.1 miles each, and I was exhausted by both the training and the races themselves. And here was a woman more than a decade older than I was, with cancer, who was competing in one of the most challenging races on the planet.
Let’s review what an Ironman Triathlon entails: swim 2.4 miles in the ocean. Then bike 112 miles. And after you’re done with that, run a marathon. Even the most elite athletes take eight or nine hours to complete the grueling race. The notion of a woman in her fifties with terminal cancer completing the race seemed so outlandish, so improbable, I knew she would make an incredible news story and that our viewers would be just as fascinated as I was.
The first thing I did was call my dad, Dr. Roger Maxfield. He is a pulmonologist and a huge inspiration in my life. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a doctor to spend my days like he does, helping people who are suffering, and teaching medical students to do the same. I even started college as a premed student before switching to journalism. I trust my dad’s opinion on just about everything, but Isabella’s story centered on his specialty.
“Dad, can you believe this? A woman with stage 4 lung cancer is going to do an Ironman Triathlon,” I told him. “What would you tell one of your patients if they wanted to do that?”
I recounted the details for him: diagnosed in early 2018, Isabella had undergone targeted chemotherapy to attack the tumors that had ravaged her body. She had been unable to walk for months because of cancer in the base of her spine and her pelvis. She had tumors in her brain and a seven-centimeter tumor in her left lung. But then that spring, she started getting better. She got out of bed and learned to walk again. And run again. And bike again. And now she was about to attempt the Ironman in Hawaii, marking her fiftieth marathon in all fifty states.
“That’s incredible,” my dad agreed. “Everyone has a different experience with cancer, and hers definitely sounds unique.”
At first, Isabella thought it was a running injury. For a few months in the fall of 2017, she dismissed her symptoms as overuse and tried to back off the training, hoping the pain would subside. But Isabella’s version of easing up on exercise is what most people would consider intense. She placed first in her age group in a half marathon that fall and even did an Ironman race in December.
She finally went to a sports medicine specialist in January of 2018 when the pain in her lower back became too excruciating to ignore. The doctor ordered an MRI. And that’s when they knew it was cancer. Everywhere. Dozens of tumors ravaging her body. Within a month she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, an incurable form of the disease. Doctors soberly told her that she probably had six months to live.
“How could this happen?” Isabella thought at the time. “I never drank, never did drugs, ate healthy, always exercised, and I had never smoked a day in my life. And now I had lung cancer? I didn’t think it was possible.”
Dissecting the details of Isabella’s grave illness, I was asking myself some of those same questions. I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle, eating well and exercising. My main health risk factor is probably that I don’t get enough sleep, owing to the two a.m. wake-up calls when I’m working the morning shift, coupled with my teenagers’ late-night schedules. I still believe that my choices offer me a better shot at a long, healthy life. But Isabella is proof that there is no guarantee, and that no one is invincible.
One of the hardest parts was telling her family. Isabella has five children—four sons and a daughter—and she also helped raise her nephew. Cason, David, Bella, Oliver, and Christopher are in their teens and twenties, and each one was shocked that their intrepid and fearless mother would have to contend with something far more serious than trying to finish a one-hundred-mile ultramarathon. This was a woman who had stepped away from her corporate career as a lawyer in her early forties and seemed motivated by some invisible force to push her petite five-foot-two-inch body to the limit. She had biked from Cairo to Cape Town, run an ultramarathon across Kazakhstan, and raced 250 kilometers through Costa Rica. Each of her children had accompanied her on one of her various physical challenges around the world. And now she was going to die?
Isabella turned to mindfulness and meditation to cope with the stress of her illness. Unable to run or bike for exercise, she needed to find another outlet to calm her mind. She focused on finding joy and letting go of the aspects of her life that she couldn’t control. She savored each day instead of counting how many she had left.
“It’s an illusion that we are all healthy and safe and will live long lives,” Isabella pointed out to me in a recent conversation. “Everyone has been dealing with this during COVID. Part of it is accepting what is, not what you want it to be.”
Stepping into Isabella’s home in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, is like entering a fascinating museum, filled with unique artifacts. Her career as an international lawyer and her penchant for the most esoteric athletic competitions had allowed her to visit dozens of countries on every continent on Earth. Ornate Uzbek veils were framed and hung in the family room. A hallway featured traditional Japanese warrior clothing. A glass jar was filled with Libyan jewelry that Isabella bought from local artisans as she ran across the desert in one of her most strenuous races.
“The women told me the bells would ward off evil spirits,” she explained. “It’s a wonderful way to see a country to run or bike across it.”
Feature stories don’t always have to be rushed on the air, and occasionally we get to luxuriate with an entire workday devoted to reporting and writing without having a set deadline to get the story on TV. Our news story on Isabella wouldn’t air for several days, so photographer Danny Prado and I took our time as we walked around her house, marveling at her collections. She explained that after leaving the corporate world, she turned her passion for handmade artifacts into a business, as the co-owner of the Philadelphia auction house Material Culture. We finally sat down for the interview near Isabella’s kitchen. I was wearing leggings and running sneakers so we could go for a jog after we talked. She pulled aside her fleece jacket to show me the port in her chest and casually mentioned that she’d had chemotherapy the day before.
“We don’t have to go running if you aren’t feeling up to it,” I told her. I was nervous, knowing she had just gone through treatment. I would never want to ask someone to do something for a news story that could wind up hurting them.
Isabella insisted she would be fine. And indeed she was. On camera, she told us about how the experimental cancer drugs were working and that her cancer had not progressed. She didn’t know how long it would last, but she was stable for now. She was still checking items off her bucket list and even adding new ones.
“I am going to make the most of this phase, and I am going to make the most of what comes next,” she told us.
Going outside into the November air, Isabella and I went for a light jog, and she told me about her next supercharged athletic feat: to climb Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America. Isabella and her daughter, Bella, had the trip planned for January of 2019, summertime in Argentina when the weather would be the most forgiving at 22,000-feet altitude. Isabella had hiked in Spain at moderately high altitude since having been diagnosed and said she was confident her lungs could handle the thin air.
“The doctors thought I was crazy with the altitude, but I had no trouble. Even with a big tumor in my lung, it was fine,” she said. I nodded in agreement, silently concurring with the doctors’ concerns about the perilous climb. On the drive back to the office that afternoon, thinking about Isabella’s lofty achievements, I wondered how much more my body could accomplish if I had the courage to push myself harder. If I trusted myself the way Isabella did. Maybe I could train for that marathon after all.
My news story about Isabella would air over Thanksgiving weekend 2018, timed to coincide with NBC’s coverage of the Ironman. Isabella had finished the grueling race in a little under fifteen hours in what would be her seventeenth Ironman distance triathlon. Her family was there cheering for her at the finish line.
Six months after my story aired, the New York Times featured Isabella and her daughter on the front page of the Sports section. “She Had Stage 4 Lung Cancer, and a Mountain to Climb,” the headline read. The article, which featured photos and a detailed description of their journey to summit Aconcagua, was a sensation.6 Isabella was flooded with offers for book deals and speaking engagements. Drug companies wanted her to be their spokesperson. Isabella, who at that point had no presence on social media, felt overwhelmed.
“I didn’t want to be an advocate and die the next day,” she explained to me in early 2021, three years after doctors told her she had six months to live. She was about to start another targeted experimental cancer treatment. The procedure involved extracting T-cells from her body that are fighting the tumors, multiplying them in a lab, and reinjecting them into her body: a fresh army to battle the cancer. She would have to endure a week of chemotherapy before the procedure, before the T-cell army would hopefully reset her immune system. She would be hospitalized for weeks. The doctors at Memorial Sloane Kettering told her that this was the first in-human trial for the procedure.
“I don’t have much to lose by trying it,” Isabella told me. “And maybe the research they gain from me can help someone else out.”
Isabella does have a social media presence now, Facebook and Instagram accounts called Bike Breathe Believe. She leverages her high-profile adventures to educate people about lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths in the world.7 She shares that while people assume most lung cancer patients are smokers, more than a quarter of American women under age fifty who were diagnosed with lung cancer have never smoked.8 Young women are getting lung cancer at higher rates than men. And because it’s hard to detect, lung cancer advances in silence, offering a 19 percent survival rate after five years.9 Isabella knows that she is the outlier. She knows that what she has accomplished cannot be replicated. But she hopes that her determination and grit, her refusal to let cancer conquer her life, will serve as an inspiration to others.
“I just need to settle a bit more into slo-mo speed,” Isabella wrote in an April 12, 2021, Instagram post soon after being discharged from the hospital.10 She was dramatically weakened by the treatment and had lost ten pounds and all her hair. “Rejoice in just being. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Just rest and recover. Possibly more difficult for me than the challenges of the treatment itself!”
Two weeks later, she walked another marathon and signed up for a two-mile swim race. “Hope springs eternal,” she said.
By September of 2021, Isabella was reflecting on the miracle of having survived—and enjoyed—another summer. With her husband, her children, and her parents, she watched birds and admired fireflies, covered her bald head with a fabulous hat, and had a dance party on the sand at the beach. As with all her social media updates, I was relieved to see her smiling face.
“Unlike hope that seems to relate to the future, joy comes in the present moment,” Isabella said. “All you have to do to experience joy is to be present in every moment and not think about what may or may not come next.”
The stories of Yarelis and Isabella are incredibly inspiring, as each has overcome significant obstacles to survive. But it’s not lost on me that these two cases exist on opposite ends of the spectrum of medical treatment in America. A child who needs a proven cancer treatment can’t get it because of draconian immigration enforcement. A woman who is treated at one of the top cancer hospitals in the world has access to cutting-edge experimental drugs. A child who cannot travel because she can’t obtain the proper visa. A family that can travel the world for sport and adventure. A child whose story required a grandfather’s persistence and a lawyer’s intervention to be told. A woman whose story was promoted by endurance athletic companies and drug manufacturers.
I hope you don’t think I am judging either family by drawing these distinctions. But I would be remiss to present these two stories as equivalent. They share a spirit of survival and optimism and strength. But the same inequity that was on dramatic display during COVID exists throughout our medical system for a variety of diseases. Before vaccines were available, among lower-income areas in ten major American cities where the population was mostly non-white, the COVID death rate was nine times higher than primarily white communities of the same income level.11 Lung cancer death rates can be up to 17 percent higher in lower-income areas.12 Researchers note there are many factors contributing to these disparities. But different communities will not suffer these diseases in the same way.
“As much as you try, if you don’t find the right people, it doesn’t work. It’s hard for people to figure things out unless someone comes to help us,” Gertrudis explained to me.
But I don’t think he gives himself enough credit for saving his granddaughter’s life. If he had not pulled Neil Mullin aside that November day at the coffee shop, Yarelis likely would have died, her lifesaving sister stuck in El Salvador. Yes, the media coverage certainly helped. Our stories formed the connective tissue that linked Yarelis’s family with the lawyers and politicians who advocated on her behalf. But it was Gertrudis’s resourcefulness and tenacity that saved her.
I am left to consider what my role is in covering these medical stories. What I can offer you, the viewer, in the two minutes on TV during which I attempt to summarize a life and a struggle. I think the common thread is the tireless will to survive. The love of a family. The devotion through pain and suffering. The determination to enjoy every day. Sharing some pearl of wisdom with our community from a person who is staring death in the face. Isabella’s mindfulness practice offers an approach that applies to us all.
“I am doing things without an attachment to an outcome,” Isabella told me. “I’m finding joy in every day.”