When I was 29 years old I was a chief medical resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. One summer day, I went to the faculty pool. My social life was fine, but I increasingly wondered when I would meet the kind of woman I would actually want to spend the rest of my life with. Just then my future wife Carolyn stood up from across the pool to gather her belongings to leave. I knew in that instant that she was the one.
I decided that telling her at that very moment that she was going to marry me and be the mother of my children might seem a bit forward. But I assumed she was a hospital employee and that I would eventually cross paths were her again. After months of searching for her, she appeared as a 4th year medical student on the ward next to mine. I asked a colleague who was supervising her to tell me her name and to arrange a blind date. He told me her name, but that he didn’t believe in blind dates. He did say, however, that he would ask if she would be “receptive to an overture”. He learned that Carolyn and a male student were the class couple and that the boy had already purchased an engagement ring for his planned proposal to Carolyn at the end of the school year. My colleague returned to my office and told me, straight-faced, “I think she would be receptive to an overture”.
Fortunately for me, she was.
On our second date, Carolyn joined me and two of my friends for what was supposed to be a 40-mile bike ride. My friends and I arrived dressed and equipped for a long bike ride. Carolyn arrived in a T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and a 3-speed bicycle. After 1 mile I could see she was struggling. I asked her if she would rather go to dinner than complete the ride. She emphatically said yes. Within a few more dates the only questions were: when should we get married and where would we live? Carolyn wouldn’t ride a bike again for years.
I had already agreed to come to the Dana-Farber as a clinical fellow and Carolyn fortunately then matched at New England Medical Center for her surgical residency. We arrived in Boston in 1987 and began building our life together. Carolyn and I had two children, all while Carolyn was quickly becoming one of the leading breast cancer surgeons in the country. She joined the faculty at the DFCI and Brigham and Women’s, where she was the founding director of the Comprehensive Breast Health Center. I completed my clinical training at the Dana-Farber and then embarked on a research career, frustrated by the cancer therapies available at that time.
In 1999 Carolyn developed a severe herniated disk while lifting a patient and required surgery. She told me as part of her postop recovery she was going to train to do the PMC. Given our previous biking experience, this seemed like the old joke where a patient asks his surgeon whether he will be able to play the piano after his operation. The surgeon says “yes”, to which the patient says, “that’s funny, I couldn’t play the piano before”.
Our two children were only 7 and 4 at the time. Carolyn and I agreed that if she was training for the PMC, I would babysit, no questions asked. Carolyn trained a lot! Like everything else she did, Carolyn was determined to become a superb rider (even if she never really did change gears as much as she should have). She trained with PMC regulars such as Eric Winer, Jim DeCaprio, and Lee Nadler, and did the 2-day ride from Sturbridge in 2000. She eventually rode 10 times, raising $200,000.
I remember being in awe when I would watch the odometer on long car trips and think to myself, wow, we haven’t even gone 192 miles yet. Carolyn would still be peddling if this was the PMC.
The summer of 2003 Carolyn found a small dimpling of her breast and had a breast biopsy done while she was in between her own operating room cases. It was breast cancer. She ultimately needing several rounds of surgery and chemotherapy. Naturally I assumed she would skip the PMC that year, but I was wrong. We went to several sporting goods stores before we found a suitable sports bra; she still had sutures in her breast and had difficulty lifting her arm. She got a searing pain in her breast every time she hit a bump, but she bit her tongue rather than alarming her fellow riders. Carolyn was so utterly brave and amazing. I promised myself I would do the PMC when the children no longer needed a babysitter.
I did the Sturbridge to Provincetown ride from 2007-2010. Carolyn and I were able to ride several times together, and we were even joined by our teenage daughter, Kathryn Grace, in 2009. In December of 2010, however, Carolyn was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, glioblastoma, unrelated to her breast cancer. We knew her life expectancy was less than 2 years and immediately put together a dream team of scientists and clinicians from the DFCI and elsewhere. She lived almost 5 years before we ultimately ran out of bullets. Five years was certainly not enough, but it meant seeing our eldest graduate from college, our youngest enrolled in college, and few more precious holidays together.
In 2016 I resumed riding in the PMC, again in tribute to Carolyn. As a physician-scientist who works at the Dana-Farber, and having cared for my wife, I know very well how important the PMC is. In fact, funds from the PMC helped fund my own research over the years, which was recognized this past year with the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I hope all the past and present PMC riders and donors take justifiable pride in making my Nobel Prize possible. It is obviously bittersweet to not share it with Carolyn. She would be the first to tell us to celebrate, but to then start peddling again so that our children and grandchildren won’t have to fear this awful disease.
