Beating cancer Survivor Carolyn Bongirno


takes aim with Skate for Hope By Dave LeMieux


Carolyn Bongirno, with husband Keith and daughter Natalie For 32 years Carolyn Bongirno’s


life was a heady, happy, success- ful mixture of ability, persistence and good fortune — so much so that she felt she could and should step back from her dream job as senior facility manager at the RDV Sportsplex Ice Den in Orlando, Florida, and begin a family.


When Bongirno and husband


Keith’s initial efforts failed, her phy- sician suggested a mild fertility drug. There was no reason to suspect that this latest chapter of her life would play out any differently from the pre- vious ones. From the time she took her first figure skating lesson to the day she opted out of the successful corpo- rate career she’d built from the ground up, Bongirno always had an uncanny ability to make the perfect move at the perfect moment. Make no mistake, she’d always


worked hard, but she also seemed to have a sixth sense when it came see- ing golden opportunities in places oth- ers couldn’t. Barely more than a month after


she first stepped on the ice at age 10, her instructor told her parents, “You should get her into some private les- sons.” “I tried it and, just, there was noth-


ing more joyful,” Bongirno said about skating.


When bursitis and tendinitis put


an end to her competitive career at 17, she threw herself into both work and study at The Ohio State University.


38 MAY 2017 On a whim after graduation, she


moved to Orlando and six months lat- er met Keith. By 1997, Bongirno began a job


she’d worked impossibly hard to land at the RDV Sportsplex.


Out of the blue “The doctor said the fertility drug


wouldn’t work if I was working 60 or 70 hours a week, so I stepped back from my dream job. I was going to remodel the house and let life take its course,” she remembered. She’d lived a healthy lifestyle and


had a spotless family medical histo- ry. It’s kind of an understatement to say Bongirno was optimistic and excit- ed that day in 1998 when she walked into her doctor’s office to begin fertility treatments. She barely


remembers walking out. shell-shocked.”


“I was terrified,” she said. “I was An endless loop of unthinkable, un-


believable words and phrases played and replayed in her head: “three lumps” … “stage 3 breast cancer” … “spread to your lymph nodes” ... “nu- merous surgeries” … “months of exten- sive chemotherapy.” Children? Out of the question (she


later learned she’d be lucky to survive chemo). “I felt like I’d failed,” she said. “I’d


been on this path and it was just de- railed, shattered in a minute. I sat in


my house for three days and called all my closest and dearest friends, those people you can say anything to.” Three days of fear, three days of


tears, followed. And then, she began to get up again.


The defiant one She’s still not sure where her iron


will to survive came from. “I kind of went into being real-


ly brave or being in complete denial, I’m not sure which,” she said. “I said, ‘You’re wrong! I’m going to be fine!’” She kept that red-hot coal of de-


fiance burning at every step in her treatment and recovery. An example from an American


Cancer Society support group meet- ing for women on post-chemo make- up techniques: “I’m sitting in a room with six other bald women with no eyebrows, and we’re going around the room introducing ourselves,” she said. “You know, ‘Hi. I’m Susie and I have ovarian cancer.’ Well when they got to me I said, ‘I’m Carolyn and I had breast cancer.’”


Although her doctors said other- wise and insisted on four debilitating months of


intensive chemotherapy,


Bongirno preferred to think of herself as cancer free after an eighth ma- jor surgery removed the last of her tumors. (Of course, she believed her doctors and knew chemo was neces- sary, but she wasn’t going to let her cancer know it wasn’t already beaten.)


PHOTO COURTESY OF LEAH ADAMS


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