Happy birthday Sloane! Eight years old, tomorrow. Sorry about being early, but my column doesn’t run on Tuesdays, and in my profession — newspapering; ask your grandmother about it — a day early is far better than a day late.
We’ve never met. But your grandmother is a reader. She contacted me in October, wanting me to write something, and after patiently waiting for … gee … six months, told me the story about how your birth saved her life and how you inspire her every day.
Which struck me as the sort of story a little girl should hear: how she saved a life, just by showing up. Because if you can do that, without even trying, imagine what else you may do someday.
Your grandmother, Maida Mangiameli, lives — thanks to you — in Hawthorn Woods. When your mom, Kate, was pregnant with you, she did something many new mothers do — try to make the world as welcoming a place as she could for you.
There isn’t much that can be done about, say, the nation sliding toward totalitarianism. But she could make sure her daughter’s grandmother wasn’t smoking like a chimney.
“I was a heavy smoker my entire adult life,” Mangiameli said. “When my daughter and son-in-law told us we’re going to be grandparents, they asked one thing: Could I please quit smoking?”
Smoking is a terrible addiction — an addiction is when something is very bad for you, but you do it anyway, because you can’t stop. Mangiameli had attempted quitting before.
“I tried for my own two girls,” she said. “But for that baby …”
It took a full year. But Mangiameli, now 75, gave up smoking. Which is when her troubles really started.
“Within a day of that last cigarette, incessant coughing began,” she said. “I went to Immediate Care for a chest x-ray. The doctor called me the next day and told me it was lung cancer.”
Around 90% of people who get lung cancer are smokers. Making the bad news worse: the thought that she’d brought it on herself.
“‘You don’t know that,” her doctor said. “Smoking could just be a contributing factor.”
About 10% of lung cancer patients never smoked — radon gas can also trigger it.
Whatever the cause, lung cancer is responsible for more deaths than any other form of cancer — 125,000 people in 2024, as many deaths as from colon, breast and prostate cancer combined.
Not only did Mangiameli have cancer but small cell lung cancer — the most aggressive kind.
“The reason it’s called ‘small cell’ is the cancer cells are much smaller,” she said. “That makes them almost impossible to get rid of.”
There are two stages of small cell, limited and and extensive. Mangiameli had extensive. “I had it in my liver,” she said.
But she also had a growing reason to live. This new arrival named Sloane.
“She’s my angel,” said Mangiameli, who went through two rounds of chemotherapy plus 28 straight days of radiation.
“It’s very difficult,” she said. “You have so much fatigue. Your appetite is gone. I lost so much weight, I looked like a walking skeleton.”
Mangiameli wants her granddaughter to know that Grandma is a fighter, not only saving her own life, but getting the word out to help others. To encourage people to stop smoking and test their homes for radon gas. And push to keep life-saving research funded.
“Lung cancer is disproportionately less funded than other cancers,” she said. “Finally research across the country was working on treatments, and possible cures, for small cell lung cancer.
“Now we’re all terrified. We heard Johns Hopkins is letting go cancer researchers. What we need is for people to call their representatives and senators, talk about finding funding for cancer research. That’s really important.”
I asked Mangiameli what Sloane is like: She’s reading two or three years above grade level and “into everything” — travel swim team, soccer, taekwondo, dance, choir.
“She is incredibly well-rounded,” her grandmother said.
This story isn’t spilling the beans to her about grandma’s cancer — Sloane’s been told.
“I talked with my daughter and thought, we need to tell her,” Mangiameli said. “I don’t want her to find out grandma was sick when I ‘m dead.”
Mangiameli decided to tell Sloane herself.
“I told her that I have lung cancer,” remembered Mangiameli. “She took the evening and most of the next day to process. Then looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Grandma, were you afraid to die?’ I said, ‘How could I be afraid? You were just a baby, and I had to be around long enough for us to be good buddies.
“She knows she is my reason to keep fighting.”