Wendy Mesley
Health
January 29, 2008 03:48 PM
beingwell magazine Winter 2008
By: Robin Harvey
For all her adult life, publicly, journalist Wendy Mesley has been the scrappy crusader with heart, the fearless woman with the in-your-face questions, who can also delicately shatter subjects off-limits or taboo.
But the private woman has never been totally under wraps.
You’ve seen her offering a supportive arm to an elderly victim of a fraudster.
And the private Ms Mesley is there behind the small glimmer of triumph when an executive squirms beneath one of her “gotcha” questions, grappling for a poor excuse for wrongdoing.
Then in 2005, Wendy Mesley — private person and public journalist — merged when she announced she was fighting breast cancer.
In 2006, she took an unprecedented step for an investigative journalist, when after her diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, she brought herself into an acclaimed Marketplace series called Chasing the Cancer Answer.
Ms Mesley was by no means the main focus of the Marketplace series.
But after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments set her on her way to recovery, she was consumed with a journalist’s curiosity: “Why me? And why are so many other people getting this horrible disease?”
“It was, of course, at first a big shock,” she says. “Then, the biggest shock was I had to deal with it and to find out how common such a club it really was. That was the big tragedy. Mine and everyone else’s.”
In prior years, Ms Mesley had had the occasional breast lump, but testing had revealed negative results for cancer.
“I really never thought it would be me. No one does, I think,” she says.
She found “the” lump in October 2004 and thinking it, too, was likely benign, got a mammogram and further tests after prodding from her husband and listening to her own good sense, despite her harrowing production schedule.
Then, in early 2005, they got the bad news. She reduced her workload but kept involved part time with her work at Marketplace because it helped keep her “focus”.
Eventually another malignant lump was found in her right breast.
Right from the start, Ms Mesley says she had a “positive attitude”.
It is in her nature. She was born an only child in Montreal, later moving to Toronto. She was single-minded about achieving her goals, taking a part-time office job at CHUM radio in secondary school, where she was still working when she went to Ryerson to study journalism.
Her drive and intelligent brand of investigative work saw her career skyrocket. She became parliamentary correspondent for CBC’s The National, the anchor for Sunday Report and, in 1994, she helped create and host CBC’s investigative program, Disclosure. She became co-host of Marketplace in 2002 and has been honoured more than once at the Gemini Awards. She married in the early 2000s.
Nearly three years after her diagnosis and, more significantly, three clear chest scans since her treatments, we caught up with Ms Mesley, back in the production phase of Marketplace, her typically harried schedule back in full swing.
Being interviewed by telephone from a phone booth in an airport in Washington — the best she could manage due to her gruelling schedule — she talks in a direct manner, with occasional bursts of laughter, pausing occasionally as she listens to flight details on the loudspeaker.
Asked about the impact of her cancer series, Ms Mesley says she is no poster child for the radical anti-medical cancer lobby.
The series took a direct hit at the lack of funding for cancer prevention and slammed the emphasis on the disproportionate financial focus on cures. These are too often the focus rather than disentangling the more complex elements that seem to cause cancer, such as carcinogens in the environment, she says.
She drew fire from some cancer groups for not stressing strongly enough the role of tobacco and second-hand smoke, and its long-term effects on any past smoker or person exposed to it in childhood. She also drew fire for her conclusion that the role of diet and cancer may be more inconclusive than most people think as a chief cause of cancer.
And she really raised hackles for saying we are in a cancer crisis.
Much of the cancer establishment chided her, while supporting her focus on the disease, maintaining that if tobacco were out of the picture and our aging population were factored in, cancer rates really would be going down.
“Look, I am very grateful for the $60,000 plus that was spent on me to make me well and I have high praise for the cancer system,” she says. “I just think we need to be looking at other causes, too.
Too many people are getting ill. This has to be stopped.”
Ms Mesley says studies have repeatedly contradicted the claims about diet and breast cancer. And she says too many cancers among young people are suspiciously increasing at alarming rates to make the “aging baby boomer cohort” theory hold water.
“I have been a health nut all my adult life, watching what I eat and exercising,” the 50-year-old says. “Sure, I smoked in the wild days of my youth, but I haven’t smoked for 15 years and they always told us that was a factor in lung cancer. They were not telling us back then it was related to breast cancer. And there is no history of it in my family.”
Ms Mesley says, even as an educated consumer reporter, she did not know alcohol was a risk factor. She was never a heavy drinker, but admits one of her risks may have been drinking more than the recommended seven to nine glasses of red wine a week.
“The people who are selling wine are very eager to get you to get the positive stuff about wine, that it is good for your heart. Alcohol is a carcinogen,” she says.
Another big contributing factor in her life that no one told her about was the birth control pill, Ms Mesley says. Like many women, she says, she was on the pill from a time in her teen years (with the exception of when she had and conceived her daughter, now 9,) until her diagnosis at age 47.
“I talked to my girlfriends and they didn’t know. I had the impression with the birth control pill that the only risk was if you smoked or had high blood pressure.”
But she later found out a few months before she was diagnosed the World Health Organization reclassified the pill as a class 1 carcinogen.
“And they are giving this out to young girls to ‘regulate their cycles’,” she says. “People have to know estrogen is a carcinogen.”
She said that is why some European countries ban beef and dairy products containing estrogen compounds.
Much of Ms Mesley’s concerns are for her daughter’s future and for future generations, when it comes to what she calls “the brew of toxic chemicals” in the environment.
“In Europe, they take coal dyes out of hair products. We are just now starting to get proper labelling on products so we know what is in them,” she says.
She tries to stay away from toxic cleaning products and chemicals and avoids things she thinks are even questionable.
The amount of radiation from one air flight is equal to one chest X-ray and, on adding up the number of flights she takes, she tries to be extra careful about other things she can control in her life. She tries to eat locally grown foods and considers herself much more “pro-active” about her lifestyle since her cancer.
However, in other ways, she says a person can’t change her essence.
“I am still the person I am. I work hard, I love my job,” she says. “But I do drink less and watch the alcohol. I try to manage the stress. And when I am out of the production phase of work, I try to decompress even more now.
As for her future?
“I don’t think that way. I’ve had three clear scans and, as far as I am concerned, that is the way it is and will be. If it ends up differently, I will deal with it then.