Liza Marshall: I Survived Cancer and Here Is How I Did It

An Interview With Savio P. Clemente

Make sure you have someone with you at doctor visits: My husband is an oncologist, so I had a real head start in many ways, but having him with me at doctor visits was so important, as a note taker, as someone who helped me to be brave enough to ask questions about my treatment and situation, as someone to chat with while waiting for the doctor to come in. Not everyone is married to an oncologist, and not everyone has a spouse or partner, but find a friend you trust, and ask them to go with you. They will be honored!

Cancer is a horrible and terrifying disease. Yet millions of people have beaten the odds and beat cancer. Authority Magazine started a new series called “I Survived Cancer and Here Is How I Did It”. In this interview series, we are talking to cancer survivors to share their stories, in order to offer hope and provide strength to people who are being impacted by cancer today. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Liza Marshall.

Liza Marshall is a retired lawyer who practiced communications law before deciding to leave law practice to manage her family, which consists of a son, a daughter, and a husband who is a medical oncologist specializing in gastrointestinal cancers. She helped to found a cancer support organization, Hope Connections for Cancer Support in Bethesda, Maryland, where she continues to serve in leadership roles as well as in her church and in her community. She is the co-author with her husband of a book called Off Our Chests: A Candid Tour Through the World of Cancer, which details the impact her diagnosis at age 43 of Stage III triple-negative breast cancer had on her, on her family and on her husband’s practice of oncology.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?

I had a relatively typical Midwest childhood, growing up in Dayton, Ohio where my father was the editor and publisher of a newspaper. When I was 11, my parents visited England for the first time, and, entranced by groups of school children in very English uniforms, they suggested that I attend boarding school in England. I attended a school in Brighton, England, where I developed an English accent and a lifelong aversion to tapioca as well as some wonderful friendships, and I learned new subjects such as Latin and geography. My family moved to Alexandria, Virginia when I was 12, and I eventually decided I preferred to go to school and live at home, so I enrolled at the local public high school (of “Remember the Titans” fame) for 10th grade. While the shift was a bit of a culture shock, I very much enjoyed and feel blessed to have had such different educational experiences, and I loved my time in public high school as well. I went from there to Duke University, which I left with a degree in Public Policy Studies and English and with a husband, and now co-author, although that was thrust upon us much later by my breast cancer. My fun “life” fact is that I was a Jeopardy champion in 1997.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Because nice matters.” I have this painted on a wooden heart in my kitchen, given to me in memory of a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 46 and died within a year of her diagnosis as it was something she lived by. I don’t have it to remind me of her short cancer journey, although it does. Its more important reminder, and I believe what she would want me to focus on, is that we all have an effect on the people around us, whether we know them or not, and that how we behave makes a difference in their lives, sometimes just for a day but sometimes for a lifetime. We should always try to behave in a way that acknowledges that power we have to make a person’s day better or to make it worse and make it our goal to do the former rather than the latter.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about surviving cancer. Do you feel comfortable sharing with us the story surrounding how you found out that you had cancer?

Well, since it’s in a published book, I think the answer is a resounding yes. I tend to be a pretty open person, and I think we all can benefit from hearing each other’s stories.

I noticed in the mirror one morning post-shower that my right breast seemed to appear larger than the left. I asked my husband, the gastrointestinal medical oncologist, what he thought, and he agreed it looked a bit odd, so I called a breast surgeon whom I had seen before. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound, neither of which showed anything definitive, so a few weeks later I had an ultrasound-guided core needle biopsy (at my husband’s cancer center). When the results came back, my husband was accidentally copied on the pathology report, so he is actually the one who told me I had breast cancer, which made for an interesting twist in our relationship and in our cancer journey together.

What was the scariest part of that event? What did you think was the worst thing that could happen to you?

I’m not sure anything is scarier than hearing the words, “You have cancer,” whoever says them, but hearing it from my husband, who sounded very shocked and quite shaken, was even scarier. Neither one of us really had any idea that I had breast cancer, and surely spouses of oncologists don’t get cancer, right?

I was told soon thereafter that I had triple-negative breast cancer, which in 2006, when I was diagnosed, had a 40 to 50% rate of recurrence, was more aggressive than other forms of breast cancer, and had very few treatment options, so I was well aware that the likelihood of a cure was not high. I knew I could die from it.

In many ways I was not and am not afraid of dying, so that was not the worst thing, but because I had a fairly large exposure to cancer patients through my husband’s work (we see a lot of his patients around town) and through his talking about work, I knew how bad the effects of the cancer and the treatment could be, and I could imagine the impact my treatment and potential death would have on my family, things I really didn’t want to put them through.

How did you react in the short term?

I panicked. Then I handed out Thanksgiving pies for a fundraiser I had organized as pie delivery day was the same day as I received my diagnosis. Then I went to the hospital for scans and to talk to oncologists who weren’t my husband. The panic didn’t subside, but taking action at least put it in the background a bit. I also knew I needed to remain calm around my children, who were 13 and 10 at the time, so by the end of the day, when we picked them up, I had developed a veneer of calm, but I’m pretty sure I cried after I went to bed that night.

I have to acknowledge that I was incredibly fortunate in many ways, but one of them was that because my husband was an oncologist, he knew exactly what to do right away, and we had almost immediate access to a breast oncologist, testing, advice. There were some downsides later on to having a medical oncologist as a husband and caregiver (not all doctors know how to give every shot), but in the short term, it was a blessing to get me through the first few days and weeks.

After the dust settled, what coping mechanisms did you use? What did you do to cope physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually?

I used quite a few, my main one being that I just continued as much of my regular life as I could manage. I kept my volunteer jobs, I took the kids to all of their activities. I got together with friends as I could and am incredibly grateful to them for taking care of us. I tried to keep up what exercise I could. I have a strong faith, and one of my volunteer activities was teaching Sunday school with my husband, so we continued to do that together as well as attend church, which I found comforting both spiritually and socially, as we had and continue to have a wonderfully supportive community there.

The support of those around me was important to my being able to keep things as normal as possible. Their kindness to me mattered a great deal.

Is there a particular person you are grateful towards who helped you learn to cope and heal? Can you share a story about that?

I am particularly grateful to my husband, who tells everyone he was a terrible caregiver, but he wasn’t at all. He was a different caregiver from a layperson because he knew too much about cancer, but I was very blessed to have the comfort of someone who did know so much with me and available to me at all times of the day and night. He helped empty my drains after surgery (I am very squeamish), gave me tips on coping with side effects, answered the same questions over and over again as I tried to understand what my diagnosis was and what my treatment was. He also fed us all, kept up his incredibly demanding job, jumped in to help with the kids when I couldn’t do things, all without complaining or letting me know how hard it was on him.

In my own cancer struggle, I sometimes used the idea of embodiment to help me cope. Let’s take a minute to look at cancer from an embodiment perspective. If your cancer had a message for you, what do you think it would want or say?

Appreciate what you have (including wrinkles, achy joints, irritations, frustrations…) because I can take it all away.

What did you learn about yourself from this very difficult experience? How has cancer shaped your worldview? What has it taught you that you might never have considered before? Can you please explain with a story or example?

I learned that I am pretty resilient, even if it’s just because that’s the only way I know to be in the face of something as life-threatening as triple-negative breast cancer. Many people did not know I had cancer and even those who did have commented on how little it seemed to affect my daily life. As I mentioned above, that was a coping mechanism in many ways, but I appreciated the fact that my psyche allowed me to keep on “living.”

I also learned that while having cancer was a difficult experience in many ways, I am incredibly lucky to have good health insurance, general good health, a supportive family and several supportive communities, and my experience strengthened my feelings that everyone should have access to healthcare that is not tied to having an employer. I recognize how tenuous my access to healthcare is since I do not work and am totally reliant on my husband’s good health and our good luck to maintain access to healthcare.

When I was a junior lawyer, the country suffered an economic downturn, and several young lawyers were laid off. One of them was diagnosed soon thereafter with breast cancer. Her only access to health insurance was through the firm via COBRA, and of course that ran out after a year, leaving her uninsured with a dreadful and life-threatening disease. She died. I couldn’t imagine being diagnosed with breast cancer at that young age, but the idea that someone had to face a life-threatening disease without any way of paying for her treatment and therefore unable even to access treatment in a country where we have so much was mindboggling and very distressing to me. While this happened about 15 years before my own breast cancer diagnosis, my colleague’s experience set against my experience reminded me almost every day how incredibly fortunate I was and how much more difficult, if not impossible, health challenges are for others who do not have as many blessings, some of which we could provide to all who live in this country but choose not to.

How have you used your experience to bring goodness to the world?

I helped found an organization in the Washington, DC area called Hope Connections for Cancer Support, which provides at no charge to its participants, who are both cancer patients, and importantly also their caregivers, programs of support, education, and wellness. I have been involved since our inception and work hard to help raise funds and awareness so that we can continue to support cancer patients without any charge to them.

What are a few of the biggest misconceptions and myths out there about fighting cancer that you would like to dispel?

Gosh, there are so many! I think one of my biggest ones is that we have somehow done something wrong that has caused us to get cancer — not enough exercise, too much exercise, eating the wrong thing, living in the wrong place, talking too much on cellphones. Yes, there are a few obvious links between behavior and cancer, but for the most part, why we get cancer is inexplicable and probably just our bad luck. For that reason, I think trying to change your behaviors dramatically after a cancer diagnosis and in ways that are not scientifically proven to improve outcomes is not necessarily helpful. Certainly, for some people, feeling that you have taken control over something uncontrollable and unexplained can be helpful for mental health, but allowing it to take over your life to the point that you make yourself unhappy, I think, is ill advised.

I also think the almost universal use of words like “fight” and “battle” around cancer can be damaging to cancer patients. They suggest that if you don’t succeed in “defeating” cancer that you have somehow failed or lost, instead of recognizing what treatment allowed you to gain in the face of a potentially fatal disease. Not only should cancer patients not need to feel guilty or responsible for their outcomes, whether good or bad, it is not healthy for them to bear that burden. In the first place, many times those words are imposed by others rather than used by the patient themselves, when they are the ones who get to decide how they want to approach and deal with their cancer. Secondly, many of us do have to learn to live with either our cancer or the effects of treating it, so perhaps the concept of “fighting” isn’t always appropriate. The late Norm McDonald expressed a similar sentiment when talking of someone else who died of cancer, noting that when we talk of battling cancer, dying therefore makes us “losers,” which is not really how most of us want to go out, I think.

Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experiences and knowledge, what advice would you give to others who have recently been diagnosed with cancer? What are your “5 Things You Need To Beat Cancer? Please share a story or example for each.

Let me begin by cautioning that as I said above, I am uncomfortable with the language of “beating” cancer. My “five things” are more about coping with cancer, cancer treatment, and being a cancer survivor, which may lead to “beating cancer” but may not, but I hope that they might lead to increased quality of a person’s life, whatever their health situation.

1. Make sure you have someone with you at doctor visits: My husband is an oncologist, so I had a real head start in many ways, but having him with me at doctor visits was so important, as a note taker, as someone who helped me to be brave enough to ask questions about my treatment and situation, as someone to chat with while waiting for the doctor to come in. Not everyone is married to an oncologist, and not everyone has a spouse or partner, but find a friend you trust, and ask them to go with you. They will be honored!
2. Find someone to talk to about your experience: I attended a support group at Hope Connections for Cancer Support, the organization I had helped found, and I remember two women with metastatic ovarian cancer there who had become friends because of their participation in the group and because of their similar situations. One said, “We have promised each other that if one of us is in the hospital, the other one will come in and pluck chin hairs out for us!” I thought that said so much about finding someone who understands what you are going through in a personal way and having that person to share your emotions, worries, and even joys with. That can be through a support group, through a doctor’s waiting room, through a friend connecting you, through social media, through a cancer advocacy and support organization, but reach out and find someone and listen when someone wants to talk to you about their cancer experience.
3. Find things that make you feel happy: When I had cancer, I was of course very afraid and somewhat paralyzed by my diagnosis, but I quickly discovered that in some senses it was a freeing experience as expectations were lifted. I started looking for ways to keep my morale up, and I discovered a variety that worked for me: walking, eating chocolate (seemingly contradictory but both cause endorphin release, I think), crossword puzzles (I found these to be a wonderful distraction while waiting for scans, doctor’s appointments, tests, and I continue to carry them with me today to help alleviate situations I find stressful). In addition, a group of five women whose children were all in the same class as my son somehow developed a lifelong friendship out of my cancer diagnosis, and we continue to meet for dinner once a month, which is a blessing my cancer diagnosis brought me and, I think, them as well.
4. Exercise grace towards others and towards yourself. Perhaps this goes back to “Because nice matters,” but as someone who has seen cancer from the patient side but who in fact has spent many more years learning about it from the side of an oncologist, I have learned (and our book attempts to show) that it is difficult to be a patient, to be a caregiver, to work with cancer patients, and that we all benefit when we can try to understand and sympathize with the person in each role. The patient has much to deal with physically and emotionally; the caregiver bears both the patient’s burdens and his or her own without a societal and community structure to provide the kind of support a patient often receives; those who provide medical care work incredibly hard and take on patients with one of the most complicated illnesses with varied cure rates, but they cannot be all things to all people at all hours of the day. If we can each try to look at things through the eyes of others, the world will be a better place for all.
5. Don’t forget to live: For me one of the most important things I did was to change as little about my life as possible. I kept my various volunteer jobs, I drove the kids to school and after-school activities, I continued to go out with friends and also to do my daily household chores. Yes, I cut back, and yes, there were days I couldn’t do some things I had planned or I planned around the days I knew I would be out of commission, but I found keeping my life as much the way it had been really helped me feel normal and healthy. And we didn’t just work to hold on to what we already had, but we lived as if there would be a tomorrow. My husband notes that cancer patients frequently hunker down, focusing only on their treatment, figuring that they will go back to “living” after they are finished with treatment, but none of us ever knows what is coming down the pike (pandemic, anyone?), so remembering to live each day is important for all of us, cancer patients and “regular people” alike.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?

I truly believe that if we could all work to see things as others see them, we would make life better for everyone. Sympathy, empathy, caring, compassion, these all go a long way to lifting others up, and they are universal. It doesn’t matter what language we speak, what culture we come from, what color we are, what higher power we believe in or even if we believe in one at all. Our caring for our fellow human, the ones next to us, the ones in our community, the ones who live in our country, and the ones around the world, that is what I would love to inspire and what inspires me when I see it in others.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

George Clooney. I have always admired George Clooney since “ER” days, and I must admit to having a crush on him since then, but my crushes are always on people who are warm, intelligent, empathetic, and kind, and he seems to fit that bill. He makes an appearance in our book as someone that also personally (via the magic of television) gave me hope at a time when I was afraid and lonely just by showing up on David Letterman the night of my mastectomy, so while he doesn’t know it, he was part of my cancer experience and a good luck charm for me.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We have a book website, where we have our upcoming appearances. https://www.offourchestsbook.com/

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!