The ABC News correspondent, who says the ‘irony is not lost on me’
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NEED TO KNOW
- Will Reeve reveals his testicular cancer diagnosis from earlier this year.
- He underwent surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, the same hospital that treated his mother, Dana, for lung cancer: “The irony is not lost on me that 20 years after my mom died of lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there I was in the same building”
- Currently cancer free, he urges people to “Pay attention to your body.”
After Good Morning America correspondent Will Reeve first noticed a tender lump on one of his testicles while in the shower this past April, his wife, Amanda Dubin Reeve, urged him to get an ultrasound. “It’s probably nothing,” she told him, “but what if it’s something?”
Once the ultrasound revealed a mass, the 34-year-old ABC News national correspondent had an orchiectomy, the surgical removal of the cancerous testicle (and the standard procedure for testicular cancer.) After further tests revealed that 95 percent of the testicular cancer found was embryonal carcinoma, a more aggressive form of the disease, Reeve, the son of Christopher and Dana Reeve, underwent a six-hour surgery to remove dozens of lymph nodes from his abdomen at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. in New York City. (Three of the lymph nodes tested positive for testicular cancer, requiring two rounds of chemotherapy.)
“The irony is not lost on me that 20 years after my mom died of lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there I was in the same building, getting treated for cancer,” says Reeve.
Credit: ABC/Heidi Gutman
Currently cancer free as of his latest check up on Sept 8, the experience reconnected him to his parents in a new way.
“I was experiencing life as each of my parents at the same time,” he shares. “Because I was a cancer patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering, going through chemotherapy, I was getting a first hand experience of what my mother went through. And the heaviness of that was apparent to me throughout.” (Dana Reeve, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer in 2006 at age 44.)
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While there, his mother’s former oncologist would come by at the end of his shift, “every day to say hello,” he says, “just making sure I was okay. I couldn’t help but thank my mom who was such a singular force in this world because she clearly had an impact on him 20 years ago to the point that he would want to come and visit his patient’s son.”
Reeve also thought often of his father, who became a quadriplegic in 1984 when he was thrown from a horse, and who died in 2004 at 52 years old. “Simultaneously, I was learning more about what it was like to be my dad in the final nine years of his life, where he had my mom and our family taking care of him,” he says. “And here I was, wth my wife. who since the day I met her, has reminded me of in so many ways of my mom and now playing the role of wife and caregiver. And I got to feel the profound love and appreciation that my dad felt.”
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Perseverance and grit were imprinted on Reeve from an early age. He grew up watching his parents fight for spinal cord injury awareness and research and launch The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. “Watching my parents up close and realizing they had a platform to take the adversity they faced and repurpose it into something hopeful left a major impact on my life and and how I try to live it,” he says. “To give people a reminder that there’s a way through.”
Inspired by their example, he hopes sharing his story can help others. As he puts it, “Part of their legacy is sharing parts of themselves that are vulnerable or uncertain but may help others in their own uncertain lives.”
Catching it early was an important step. “I give all the credit to Amanda for urging me to get the ultrasound,” he says. “I think that’s a message that I would have is – it will shock you. It will stun you. You’ll think it can’t happen to you but that doesn’t change the facts and that won’t cure what ails you.” (About 10,000 men annually in the United States are diagnosed with testicular cancer.)
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And so with each step since his diagnosis and treatment, he says, “I kept saying, I’m just going to try and win each day.”
“I’ve had the incredible partnership of my wife, and the support of family and friends and my colleagues at ABC, who’ve been with me every step of the way,” he says. “I’m surrounded and lifted up by love and also stellar medical care.”
“Now that I’m on the other side. I’d like to give everyone a happy update,” adds Reeve, who will initially go in for scans and bloodwork three to four times a year, and decrease from there, to monitor for any chance of recurrence. “We started the year off with the happiest update – that I got married. And then we took a bit of a nosedive into scary unchartered territory but now we’re back up flying again and life is great.”
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