Jacquie Walker has received numerous acts of kindness in the six weeks since the announcement that she had early stage breast cancer.
There was the 20-something man – a member of the age group that doesn’t watch much TV news – who reassured her “you’re doing good,” as she paid her bill at a Williamsville breakfast establishment.
There was the woman on the elevator at Roswell Park Cancer Institute who saw her on a bad day, put her arm around Walker and said: “We love you honey. You’re going to be OK.”
There was a fire chief named Ira who survived cancer who sent a guardian angel and a dove of hope that he carved for her.
Most of all, there were encouraging letters from breast cancer survivors. One was from a 92-year-old woman named Vi who told her that, in 1992, her husband called her into the TV room to watch Channel 4 news to see Walker deliver a segment advising women to get mammograms.
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At her husband’s urging, Vi got a mammogram, learned she had cancer and had surgery. Twenty-two years later, she wrote Walker about all the thrills in her life since her diagnosis and recovery.
“How lucky can a gal be?” Vi wrote.
“I cried,” Walker said, sitting at a kitchen table in her northern suburban home with her husband, Mike Beato. “It made me realize we do touch each other’s lives in ways we never realize. This made me realize Vi and I had a human connection all these years.”
Vi is about to get her favorite anchor back. Walker plans to return to her Channel 4 anchor post alongside Don Postles on Monday, working all her regular shifts.
“My main concern is stamina,” Walker said. “We don’t do heavy lifting the way a construction worker does, but what we do does require a certain amount of stamina.”
She said her recovery has been slower than she expected.
“I thought I would be treated and I would be able to jump right up and get back to work,” Walker said. “But cancer works on its own timetable. These treatments work on their own timetable. And the healing works on its own timetable.”
Her treatments will continue.
“I saw one person today posting, ‘Great you beat cancer,’ ” Walker said. “I don’t feel that I have beat cancer. I feel at the moment that there is no cancer in my body. But I think anybody who has had a diagnosis of cancer lives from test to test, screening to screening, with a certain amount of anxiety and anticipation of what the results will be. It is way too early to say that I have beaten cancer. There are always discussions of percentages your cancer will recur. I want to say I have every reason to be optimistic.”
She said the biggest takeaway from her experience is the one she told Vi and other women 22 years ago.
“Get your mammogram,” she said. “It saved my life.”
She was vigilant about getting one every year for 20 years. The routine includes a quick phone call to her husband after the results come in. This time, Beato waited longer than usual to get the call and suspected something was wrong.
When she finally called, Walker told her husband: “This is the phone call that is going to change your life.”
When viewers see her Monday, they will discover she looks the same as she did in mid-November, when she left the station to have surgery and be treated at Roswell Park. She has her hair and said she weighs just about the same as she did before.
The changes are more subtle. She noted that her job requires her to be surrounded by technology, and her experience has made her think more about human connections that she received from Vi, the cashier and the woman in the elevator.
She initially wanted to keep her diagnosis within the family, but realized that wasn’t possible when so many people saw her being treated at Roswell Park and sent her supportive emails asking how she was doing.
Walker said she knows that viewers tuning in Monday expect her to address the personal situation.
“My tendency is always to be more low-key about personal news,” Walker said. “I do plan to say something – not long, but short, and mostly to extend my appreciation for the tremendous support I have had from viewers. It has blown me away.”
Walker didn’t go out much during her treatment and preferred to wait until she knew she would be returning to work before agreeing to an interview.
“We are all different,” she explained. “Everybody’s experience with cancer is different. I felt this was the way I wanted to handle it. It was appropriate for me and my family. But I will always carry a big megaphone of getting your mammograms. But I am the person delivering the news. I have always taken that spotlight and shined it elsewhere.”
She probably missed delivering the news as much as or even more than Channel 4 viewers missed seeing her for the past six weeks.
Here are a couple of examples of how seriously she takes her job:
She received a phone call in October from her radiologist about 4 p.m. one afternoon at her Channel 4 desk. She went to her car in the Channel 4 parking lot, called her doctor back to get the test results in private and was told she had cancer. She went back to work and delivered the 5 and 6 p.m. news before calling her husband.
“I had to work,” she explained. “You shut off that part of the brain that you just want to curl up in a ball and cry, and you go right to work and put it out of your mind.”
The day that she went into surgery happened to be the day of the November storm that dropped 7 feet of snow in some areas of Western New York.
“I did not watch full time,” Walker said. “It was too upsetting to me to watch the coverage of this historic event. When they started using the word ‘historic,’ I couldn’t watch anymore because I wasn’t where I should be. I should be there, helping to guide people through this very, very difficult time in the history of this city. That was upsetting for me not to be there through no fault of my own. I keep replaying in my mind, that famous line from ‘Top Gun’: ‘This is what you train for.’
“I’m trained for that. To not be there, I did have to turn the TV off much more than I normally would.”
Besides returning to work, Walker has another full-time job. She wants to be able to reply to everyone who sent her letters and good wishes, but knows that may be impossible.
“It is my nightmare that I will not be able to return all these kindnesses,” Walker said, as she picked up some letters on her kitchen table. “I’ll be writing thank-you notes from now until the cows come home.”
email: apergament@buffnews.com
