Apr 1, 2009 12:14 am US/Eastern
Congresswoman Tells Children She Battled Cancer
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Many people were surprised when South Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz announced that she had been battling breast cancer for the past year. After making her announcement, Wasserman-Schultz sat down with
CBS4's Shannon Hori to talk about the moment she told her children she had cancer.
Wasserman-Schultz has three children: nine-year-old twins Jake and Rebecca and five-year-old Shelby. "They were my first thought," she explained. "My first thought: 'Oh my God.' At that point I didn't know, am I going to need chemo? Radiation? How is it going to affect them?"
The 42-year-old Democratic Congresswoman found a lump during a self-breast exam in December 2007 and had it biopsied. "Three days later, I got that call every woman dreads. They said I wasn't fine. I had breast cancer. It was devastating."
Sadly, that wasn't the worst of it. Wasserman-Schultz learned she was a carrier of a gene that put her at a high risk for recurring breast or ovarian cancer. To decrease those chances, Wasserman-Schultz opted to have her ovaries removed.
She also had a double mastectomy. "It was sad for me," she told Hori. "Even though I'm done having kids it was sad for me. Those are the parts that gave life to my children, sustained them. It was sad."
Wasserman-Schultz, so used to being in the public eye, also made the decision she would fight the disease in private to protect her children. She didn't want her kids to know that she was fighting breast cancer. "I fully planned to tell them when I was done with it all. I wanted to get all the way through it, make sure I could confidently tell them, look them in the eye and tell them, 'I'm ok.'"
She went to work in Congress and campaigned actively for Barack Obama all while she was undergoing major surgeries in a Washington D.C. hospital.
Only a few of her staffers knew what she was going through. "I would have procedure in morning, go back to apartment. Rest for a while, go to chamber, cast my vote and then go back home." It was a long year.
Wasserman-Schultz says she is now cancer free. Just a few days ago, she sat down to tell the most important people in her life what she had been going through.
"She said she had breast cancer and not to worry because it's all gone," Rebecca recalled. "First she said, 'Do you remember how I had surgery?' And she said, 'Well, it's breast cancer and it's all gone and I have less chance of getting it now.'"
"She's fine because she doesn't have it anymore," Jake said.
Now the Congresswoman is working to pass legislation to educate young women about breast cancer. "Maybe God had a plan somewhere to be able to use me to help other women detect breast cancer early, make sure I stay around for a while to do that. That's my plan." The public servant is taking on the public role of breast cancer survivor.
To her kids she's something much more important. Shelby explained, "She's a really good mom and I love her a lot."
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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