“It’s probably nothing,” Amanda Dubin Reeve told her husband, “but what if it’s something?”
Will Reeve, the Good Morning America correspondent, had found a tender lump on a testicle while in the shower in April. His wife urged him to get an ultrasound. It showed a mass, and the 34-year-old ABC News national correspondent, son of Christopher and Dana Reeve, had an orchiectomy, the standard surgery for testicular cancer.
Further tests found that 95 percent of the cancer was embryonal carcinoma, a more aggressive form. Reeve then underwent a six-hour operation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to remove dozens of lymph nodes from his abdomen. Three tested positive, which meant two rounds of chemotherapy.
His latest check-up, on September 8, found him cancer free.
The same building
Memorial Sloan Kettering is where his mother was treated for lung cancer. Dana Reeve, a non-smoker, died of the disease in 2006 at age 44. “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,” Reeve said.
Her former oncologist stopped by at the end of his shift, “every day to say hello,” Reeve said, “just making sure I was okay.”
He thought of his father, too. Christopher Reeve became a quadriplegic after being thrown from a horse in 1995 and died in 2004 at 52. “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,” Reeve said. Now his wife was the caregiver.
Why he went public
Reeve grew up watching his parents turn their own adversity into advocacy and found The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. “Part of their legacy is sharing parts of themselves that are vulnerable or uncertain but may help others in their own uncertain lives,” he said.
His message is plain: “Pay attention to your body.” About 10,000 men in the United States are diagnosed with testicular cancer each year. “I give all the credit to Amanda for urging me to get the ultrasound,” he said. “You’ll think it can’t happen to you but that doesn’t change the facts.”
Going forward, he expects scans and bloodwork three to four times a year at first, then less often, to watch for any recurrence. “We started the year off with the happiest update, that I got married,” he said. “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.”
