Tiburon girl conquers Alcatraz swim for breast cancer and for mom, a survivor
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Aug. 9, 2017, edition of The Ark. It earned an honorable mention for Best Feature Story in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2017 California Journalism Awards contest.
By JEFF DEMPSEY
jdempsey@thearknewspaper.com
Carolina Prieto of Tiburon stood on the support boat in the predawn morning looking out at the frigid waters of the San Francisco Bay. Just 11 years old, she was nervous, but she focused on her training.
She had swam the equivalent distance of Alcatraz to San Francisco several times over the past few months, but this was the real thing, and she knew it would be different. The water would be choppier, less forgiving. The tide could turn against her, stalling her progress and stymying her effort. Or perhaps an irrational fear could come to pass.
She turned to the boat’s captain, Tiburon resident David Holscher, and to her parents, Mauricio Prieto and Susan Moody, and asked for reassurance.
“The sharks are all at the bottom, right?”
They are, she was told, and she’d be swimming at the top. Carolina ran through her preparations and training one last time and prepared to dive in. She reminded herself why she was doing this. It was for a good cause. It was to raise money for breast-cancer research. It was for her mother.
‘A shell of a human being’
Moody’s diagnosis came Aug. 27, 2014: stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer, which meant it was estrogen-receptor-negative, progesterone-receptor-negative and HER2-negative.
In short, it was the kind of aggressive cancer that has to be, as husband Prieto put it, “bombarded with radiation.”
On top of that, the cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes.
Moody suddenly found herself looking at a plan of action that included 20 stages of chemotherapy, and even then she was told the likelihood of success was only 15 percent. At the time, Carolina and sister Sofia were 9 and 11 — old enough, Moody said, to understand what was happening to their mother but still be taken completely by surprise.
“It was the first bad thing that’s ever happened to them,” Moody said. “When we sat them down to tell them the news, they thought we were about to tell them we were getting a puppy. That was the level of innocence that was sort of broken in that moment.”
As the older daughter, Sofia took a more analytical approach.
“Carolina was much more passionate,” Prieto said. “She was terrified.”
Moody and the two girls had moved to Tiburon a year prior, in 2013 — and Prieto had just rejoined the family from Spain a week before — when the diagnosis came.
He was working from home, he said, which turned out to be a blessing. He could care for the girls while Moody underwent treatment.
For eight months she endured 20 chemotherapy treatments and six hospitalizations. It was an exhausting process that Moody said nearly killed her. Prieto said with this kind of treatment, chemotherapy may have to be adjusted if the patient gets too weak.
“The risk is that the patient just can’t take it,” he said. “So the chemo needs to be reduced.”
Moody said her physician, Dr. Mark Moasser at the University of California at San Francisco, attributed her ability to get through all 20 rounds at full strength to her experience as a swimmer.
“I grew up as a swimmer, swam all through college, and Dr. Moasser was like a swim coach for me,” she said. “The whole process really reduced me to zero. I was a shell of a human being. But he was very level-headed, very data-driven. His approach was very much like a hard coach, and it worked.”
Moody was declared cancer-free in March 2015, but the fight against breast cancer became an important cause, not just for her — for the whole family. They began a fundraising effort to raise money toward Moasser’s research, and last year, Carolina saw a chance to do her part.
Taking action against cancer
Moody and Carolina are not the only swimmers in the family. Moody and Prieto are members of the Night Train Swimmers, a Bay Area nonprofit composed of swimmers who go to extremes such as soloing the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, to raise money for worthy causes. Holscher, Carolina’s skipper off Alcatraz, is a founding member and was part of the team that set a world-record relay of 311 miles in 2015.
When Carolina began her seventh-grade year at Del Mar Middle School, she was told about the Take Action Project she would be tasked with in the spring semester.
“It’s for science class,” she said. “You have to choose a problem in the world and research it and do a presentation, so I chose breast cancer.”
The second part to the project, the part that gives it its name, is the action: Students must undertake some kind of effort to address the issue they presented. Carolina decided she would swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco to raise money for Moasser’s research. She has been swimming her whole life, and competitively for four years — but still, she said, she knew the 1.5 miles in frigid waters from Alcatraz would be a challenge.
“Training wasn’t easy,” Carolina said. “Once or twice a week I would swim out in the bay while my dad kayaked, and we would do the distance of the Alcatraz swim.”
She trained for about two months in the lead up to the May 11 swim, but at that time she was also leading the effort for the fundraiser. She created a blog to explain what she was doing and why, disseminated it to friends and family, and it spread from there. By the time the swim came around, Prieto had raised more than $6,000 — a number that would grow to $7,150.
The day arrives
Carolina was nervous the night before, she said, and it carried over to the morning of the swim, but when she and her dad hopped into the water — Prieto completed the swim with her — it all went away.
“I was thinking, ‘It’s a big ocean, and there’s only the two of us out there,’” she said. “But once I got in the water and started swimming, I was in my zone. I wasn’t nervous anymore.”
Carolina said she was able to maintain her effort over the course of the swim thanks in part to the fundraiser. People didn’t donate toward her attempting the swim, she thought to herself. They donated to see her complete it. It became her fuel.
“And I was thinking about what that money will be used for,” she said. “That it was going to a good cause.”
The swim took her just 43 minutes to complete. By comparison, this year’s Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim, held in June, has a cutoff time of 75 minutes. Carolina’s time would have been good for about sixth overall and second among all women.
Dad Prieto said she was basically sprinting the whole time.
“I had trouble keeping up with her,” he said.
When she reached the shore and touched the rock at Black Point, just west of Aquatic Park, it was a proud moment for all of them. She and her dad swam back to the support boat where Moody was waiting, and they embraced.
Moody said she felt proud of her daughter, not just for taking on a new challenge but for using it as a way to do good and conquering the fear she had around her mother’s illness.
“It’s amazing that she went on to do a swim like that,” Moody said. “If I hadn’t received my diagnosis, who knows if she would have done the Alcatraz swim this year. The diagnosis changed her and (motivated) her. It made the girls look at life more preciously.”
With Alcatraz behind her, and now as a member of the Night Train Swimmers herself, Carolina said she is looking for her next challenge.
“When I’m older, I’d like to swim the Strait of Gibraltar,” she said. “But that’s when I’m older.”
Jeff Dempsey is The Ark’s assistant editor for production and the youth and sports reporter. Reach him at 415–944–4561
