Cancer Warrior

Kathy Van Riper's kids have lived with cancer most of their lives.

Their mom's. Not their own.

In the way noisy neighbors or bad plumbing might crop up in other family's conversations, cancer comes up in theirs: how Mom's feeling, when her next scan is, whether it's time to start a new drug.

Ian, now 7, was just a tyke when he asked if his mother's breast cancer had dropped to her knees yet, apparently after overhearing how certain cancer markers in her blood went up and down.

With the cousins around, there sometimes has been a gleeful game of Raise Your Hand, as in, "Raise your hand if you want Auntie Kathy's cancer to go away!"

"Think about how long we've been talking about cancer in our family!" the 37-year-old Cotati woman said during an interview last week. "My son couldn't even talk yet."

And yet, more than six years into her fight against breast cancer, there are conversations still to be faced, places Van Riper is not ready to go as she struggles just to be a regular mom to Ian and 9-year-old Jillian.

"I'm very stubborn, and I want to be in charge," she said. "A mom is in charge. And when I cannot do that, and I feel that's slipping away from me, I can't stand it."

Van Riper, a former math, science and P.E. teacher, remains active in her children's school, though she had to give up home schooling two years ago. Like other mothers, she also shuttles them to soccer and track events five to six days a week.

A longtime runner and long-distance star at Sonoma Valley High when she was still Kathy Dalton, she was still running regularly until about three months ago, but these days does more walking.

"I'm such a runner, and it's so humiliating to me to have to resort to walking," she said. "But at this point at least I'm exercising, and that's what feeds me."

Van Riper views her entire existence right now as a personal race, taking a cue from her favorite Scripture in the Book of Hebrews, which says in part, "Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us."

In a show of solidarity, her husband of 11 years, Marc Van Riper, 35, runs each Thursday - her chemo day - the 12 miles from home in Cotati to his job at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, where he's director of administrative services for the medical center.

He marvels at his wife's strength. She falls apart emotionally after dark occasionally, he said, but "it hardly ever happens."

It was Marc Van Riper who e-mailed friends and family asking them to write ABC-TV's "The View" and nominate his wife as a "warrior" in the fight against breast cancer, a disease that strikes one in eight women and takes an estimated 40,000 American lives each year.

Nine people sent letters about her to the morning talk show, which is honoring weekly warriors through October in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Van Riper will tell her story on the show today when it airs on ABC at 10 a.m.

Brianne Lunzmann, a publicist for Ford Motor Co., "The View's" partner on the project, said the tale of Van Riper's cancer fight may have had the most impact, in part because of her two young children and her determination to live for her family.

"I don't think there's going to be a dry eye in the house tomorrow at 'The View'" Lunzmann said Tuesday.

A TV crew and producer came to the Van Ripers' house last week to collect family photos for the segment, tape daily life and record a voice-over from Van Riper's stepmother, Rosemarie Dalton, whose essay particularly caught producers' attention.

"She doesn't roll over because she's living with cancer," Dalton said. "She's not a survivor: she's surviving every day... . She's so strong, and even when she falls down she picks herself back up and keeps going."

Dalton joined the Van Ripers for their trip to New York on Tuesday. But they'll be back in time for Van Riper to catch up on a chemotherapy treatment rescheduled to Friday.

Van Riper said she knows, unfortunately, that her story is not unique, yet she broaches even the most painful subjects with a degree of candor, objectivity and energy that belie her long, exhausting battle - her thin, short hair and the eyeliner that substitutes for eyelashes these days providing the only outward sign of her disease.

Diagnosed with breast cancer June 30, 2000, when Ian was just 9 months old, Van Riper had been out of treatment for 22 months when she learned the cancer had reappeared in tumors that covered half her liver and invaded bones throughout her body.

That was 3½ years ago. She's been in continuous treatment since, trying different drugs to beat back her disease - some of them ineffective, most lasting six, eight, 12 months before the cancer began to grow again and she had to try another.

Many of the tumors are in her spine, causing periodic back pain she doesn't know how to measure. She's been sick for so long, she can't remember normal and doesn't "know how bad I feel."

She concedes that making dinner after each long day sometimes seems like an insurmountable obstacle.

She describes breaking down in the car after putting off trips to Costco or Target for household necessities, then finally getting up the energy to go only to drive around for a parking place she feels is close enough to the door.

Each change in treatment is a gamble because of the possibility the next drug won't work.

She also knows she's running out of options.

"I don't even know what's left," she said. "I haven't even had a heart-to-heart with my doctor about that because I don't want to go there."

She struggles to maintain a balance between being honest with her children about what could happen and sparing them what no 7- and 9-year-old should have to face, she said.

But she sees the concern in her children - in the way Ian rubs her back and asks where it hurts and Jillian asks, "Do you feel good today, Mommy?"

They pray together for the cancer drugs to work.

She finds herself trying to talk to both kids now about important things they'll need to know later, like alcohol, for instance, though they're still young.

The mom greedily anticipates Jillian's entering puberty so she can be available to her daughter when it comes.

It's as if she's "trying to fit a lifetime of stuff, trying to squeeze it," she said, her voice trailing off.

She's documenting it, too, maintaining a Web log to keep friends and family informed of her progress and keeping personal journals for each child - for later. It's also good therapy, she said.

"I don't know how much they'll remember. It seems like they remember a lot, but fast forward 10 years...."

But both, she said, can recite their mother's favorite Bible verse - the one about not giving up whatever race is before you.

"The word 'perseverance' is really important to me," Van Riper said, "because if there's one thing I want for my kids to look back on, I would want for them to look back on our life and know what perseverance was."