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(^38) – SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 everythingzoomer.com
T ALL CAME BACK to
me while I was writing a
short speech. My brother
Moses asked me to
introduce Diane Francis at his
ideacity 2019 conference – an
honour to be sure. Diane and I
are both journalists – she a pre-
eminent business journalist and
author. She is from the generation
ahead of me and she was a trailblaz-
er both for women in the profes-
sion and for business reportage as a
whole. Diane became the first woman
editor of a national daily newspaper
in Canada when she took the helm
as editor of the Financial Post in
- She is the author of 10 books,
the go-to columnist and commen-
tator in the field. In the heady days
of the ’90s, we would run into each
other often. I’m not given to nostal-
gia, but this assignment sparked it.
At that time, business television was
coming into its own – among a good
number of other specialty cable
channels that were being launched.
It was also a great time to be in print
- we had a major newspaper war that
bid up the assets along with the sal-
aries and profiles of reporters, pro-
ducers, editors and commentators.
Looking back, it was a golden age of
what is now euphemistically called
legacy media – so different from the
current focus on survival and disrup-
tion. And it wasn’t all about work.
Diane and I both love tennis and, for
a while, there was a very gossipy in-
sider’s Friday night game we used to
play in at the club we both belong to.
I was dismayed to learn that we are
now both members of a very different
club – the cancer sisterhood. That,
of course, is the reason for my input.
There are important intersections
as well as differences in our experi-
ences. There’s even an ideacity con-
nection. I remember tiptoeing in late
every morning at ideacity 2006 – af-
ter an MRI or some other test – be-
cause I was in the midst of being diag-
nosed with breast cancer, my first of
two. I was always grateful that the
fascinating talks could distract me
from that, if only for about an hour at
a time. Diane got her bad news short-
ly after last year’s conference.
Moses’ and my mother, Chaya,
had breast and ovarian cancer, so I
always knew I was at risk though I
was blissfully unaware of the extent
of that risk until it became a harsh
reality. Diane’s diagnosis of ovarian
cancer came like a bolt out of the
blue. She had no family history
and no symptoms, just a little
bloating that she thought was from
a nutritional supplement. That’s
the reason ovarian cancer is often
referred to as the silent killer. So is
pancreatic cancer, the disease I was
diagnosed with two years after breast
cancer. By that time we already knew
I carried the genetic mutation that
gave me huge odds of developing
breast, ovarian and, as it turned out,
pancreatic cancer. And I was very
lucky that, at that time, we were at the
dawn of what is called personalised
medicine – that is, basing your
treatment on the genetic makeup of
your tumour, not on the body part it
invaded. Because of that, the doctors
were able to tailor my chemotherapy.
We had to wait through two months
of tough treatment to see if the
tumour would shrink enough to allow
me to have surgery that offers the
only possibility for a cure. Readers
will remember it was nothing short
of a miracle. My doctors had notseen a similar response in decades
of practice.
Diane went under the knife within
a week of her diagnosis – not remote-
ly enough time to digest the situa-
tion and get over the shock. When
it comes to the surgery, I thought I
took the prize for most brutal oper-
ation. My Whipple took six-and-
a-half hours while the surgeon re-
moved a quarter of my pancreas,
half my stomach, a bunch of small
bowel and reconnected what was left
in very new ways. Diane’s surgery
took 11 hours! She lost half her co-
lon, half her diaphragm, part of her
liver and her spleen and gallbladder.It was just the beginning of a harrow-
ing course of treatment punctuated
by emergencies.
Her story brought it all back to
me – the pain and nausea, the over-
whelming anxiety followed by hope
and gratitude. It’s been 11 years since
my diagnosis, and these feelings no
longer surface on their own, just as I
am hard-pressed to recall the sweet
memories of the 1990s. For Diane
Francis, it’s only been a year. It is im-
portant to remember, but I also wish
her the power to forget.Libby Znaimer ([email protected]) is VP
of news on AM740 and Classical 96.3 FM
(ZoomerMedia properties).I
A Sisterhood
By Libby Znaimer
“Her diagnosis of
ovarian cancer
came like a bolt
out of the blue”