THE FIGHTER
Toronto woman’s incredible, inspirational battle with five separate cancers,
On one of their first dates, Sabrina Fuoco posed this question to Garrett Dunn:
“What about if I got breast cancer and I had to have a double mastectomy — how would that be?” Fuoco recalled asking Dunn over that 2011 dinner.
Having befriended her several years earlier, he knew the query was not an odd or alarmist one. He told the woman across the table that it would not change his feelings.
“And we just celebrated our first (wedding) anniversary,” Fuoco says.
What Dunn knew during that early romance, however, was that his new partner, then a 30-year-old law student, had been hit by serial cancers — four differ- ent kinds since age 3. And he also knew — as did a phalanx of family, friends and physicians — that she had faced that perverse battery with courage and abiding grace.
“She has always remained glowing and positive, never showing the huge weight that must constantly be on her shoulders,” says oncologist Dr. Abha Gupta, director of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre’s adolescent and young adult program.
“Seeing her is inspirational, and reminds me of the strength that people are capable of expressing,” says Gupta. She is treating Fuoco’s latest bout with the disease, her fifth — diagnosed as incurable two years ago.
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This time, it’s a metastatic cancer: a haywire scattering of cells that has spread to her lungs and is virtually unstoppable. Fuoco’s CT scans, taken every three months, have shown relentless tumour growth.
“It’s like this ticking time bomb inside of you,” says Gupta. “I can’t imagine being on her side” of the stethoscope.
Indeed, she says, Fuoco’s current cancer, a relapse of an earlier sarcoma, was so unwieldy that the doctor advised her patient to forgo chemotherapy to preserve her hair for her wedding, which was coming up.
“We didn’t give her chemo; she didn’t lose her hair. I’m sure she looked beautiful for her wedding. And still today you would look at her and say, ‘I don’t believe you have cancer,’ because she looks so well.” No one has any idea how long Fuoco may live. Yet here she is in her parents’ North York home, turned out and smiling on a late summer day, the picture of health that Gupta describes.
She is blending vitamin-rich smoothies and chatting amid the sculptures and Catholic icons that decorate her mother’s Italian kitchen — shining with her own spirit of determined survival.
And later, she’s in the basement, banging out her blog — Cancer Girl Smiles — that advocates for research, encourages others with the disease and bears the tag line “Today I decide to live.”
Many wonder how she has stuck to that motto all her life.
“Even at doctors’ appointments, the doctors seemed fascinated with that question,” Fuoco says. “They couldn’t understand how I could keep picking up the pieces.
“But to me that was odd, because there was no other way. Either I was going to let cancer just define me and ruin my life and just let it be what it was going to be, or I was going to try to muster up a smile and pick up those pieces and go on.”
Fuoco, 34, credits her parents’ support as key to her resilience.
But for Marcella and Frank Fuoco, who still attend each hospital appointment, the encouragement they offered their only daughter hid their anguish. Each diagnosis, her mother says, brought “the whole world crashing down on us.”
Past ordeals have helped steel them for the current fight.
“We will give Sabrina hope and strength because this is not the first time.”
If Fuoco asked her if she should buy plane tickets for next year, Gupta says she would not discourage her. But really, the doctor says, she does not know the right answer.
Fuoco herself is no Pollyanna. Cancer, she knows, has almost certainly stolen her future and cast “grim shadows” over much of her past.
“The ‘why me’ feeling? I’m not going to lie and say that didn’t happen,” she says. “I felt I couldn’t really do anything in my life for more than a few years because cancer was going to be there.
“It was almost like my life was interrupted at every milestone. At every major turning point in my life I had cancer rear its head.” Setting ‘mini-goals’
Fuoco is not done with life — not by a long shot. But with metastatic cancer, her planning windows shrank from years and decades to the three-month intervals between lung scans.
“Before, I was always a very big planner and an organizer and I would plan out goals and the future,” she says. “And now I find myself trying to still do that but it’s so much more difficult. So I do little mini-goals and mini-milestones and anything I can incorporate into the next three months.”
Her plans revolve mainly around two things: her health and helping others.
Told that chemo and radiation therapies could do more harm than good right now, Fuoco has sought alternative strategies.
“I’m taking it upon myself to kind of try to heal my body on my own,” she says, while still looking at traditional medicine or trial drug options as backstops.
Her personalized cancer regimen has included supplements and high-dose vitamin and herbal remedies, including mis- tletoe, to boost her immune system. But after reading “a dozen cancer books,” her main focus has been on food.
“I’ve completely altered my diet,” she says. “I don’t eat meat, dairy, gluten, sugar — I’ve cut out pretty much everything.”
A juicer and blender are Fuoco’s key tools as she experiments with raw vegetables and fruit. “That is like a full-time job because all day I’m juicing and cutting up vegetables.”
Fuoco does leave time for advocacy work, pushing for more funding and better care for metastatic cancer patients, especially the young. She works with Princess Margaret’s adolescent and young adult oncology program, sitting on an advisory committee that is helping pair youthful cancer survivors with younger patients who have been newly diagnosed.
She is devoted to her blog, which she began several years ago to update friends and family on her condition. It was soon read by cancer patients across the continent, many asking for advice or inspiration.
Fuoco now spends two to three hours a day writing and answering questions about her treatments and coping strategies, and soothing the anxieties of the dozens of people a week who contact her.
Fuoco’s ultimate goal is to create a foundation that could raise awareness and research funding for metastatic cancers.
As she busies herself with advocacy and survival, Fuoco has one keen regret. “I feel bad because I wanted to contribute so much” to the marriage financially, she says.
“The burden of the work now is on him, because I’m just trying to get better and heal myself if I can — because then I can accomplish great things.”
“It was almost like my life was interrupted at every milestone. At every major turning point in my life I had cancer rear its head.” SABRINA FUOCO