Excerpt: Becoming the Story
A longtime journalist, she stumbled onto the biggest story of her life: prehabilitation.
I met Loriana Hernandez-Aldama when she co-anchored the evening news at the local Fox affiliate and I showed up twice a week to argue about politics. After I moved to DC to work with Planned Parenthood, she came down with a nasty bout of cancer, which is when she found her calling. She wants to tell you that you need to get ready for whatever is headed your way, because something always is. You need to, in her words, prehabilitate. She reached out to me for some speechwriting help and to write the introduction to her new book Becoming the Story: The Power of PREHAB - Prepare - Present - Prevail. I’m grateful to her for allowing us to publish an excerpt of her book here.
by Loriana Hernandez-Aldama
The nurses at Johns Hopkins 5B (on the leukemia unit, to be exact) and others I was blessed to work with were terrific. Since most days I had no one to keep me company, the nurses became family. They understood how tough it was on me that the many people in my life who loved and cared about me couldn’t be present physically. The few people I knew in the D.C. area had demanding jobs but still did their best to visit. And I was grateful when new friends from our neighborhood took the time and trouble to drive over from Virginia. But that didn’t fill twenty-four hours a day, and I was usually awake for about twenty.
The nurses picked up extra items for me at the grocery store and secretly took my laundry home to wash with theirs. They looked out for me 24/7. I was in awe of their kindness. Sometimes after one of my walks, I would hang out at the nurse’s station just to chat—about life, my fears, their kids. I adored them. They were my heroes and my friends.
And they had their hands full taking care of patients in even worse shape than I was. They were lifting 300-pound patients. They were getting screamed at by stressed-out relatives whose mothers, fathers, brothers, or sisters were struggling to stay alive. They went nonstop, all with smiles on their faces and love in their hearts.
So, I took it upon myself to handle what I needed if they were engaged elsewhere. My total lack of patience was another contributing factor. When I hit the intercom buzzer on my bed to ask for something I needed, I was only going to hit it once. I would wait about sixty seconds, and if I didn’t hear a voice over the speaker that was fine—I got my ass up and went to get it myself.
They called me a “walkie-talkie” patient. I had no time for cancer, no time for waiting and I was on a mission, with a million questions. The wheels were always turning.
They called me a “walkie-talkie” patient.
The nurses laughed when I would grab my own warm blanket from the linen supply room. They would say, “Ms. Hernandez-Aldama, if you would give me just thirty seconds more, I would get it.” Nope . . . no time. Nope. No patience. If God blessed me with the strength to walk, then dammit I was going to use my feet to go solve whatever I had buzzed the nurse’s station about. If it was a question or a problem, I knew where to track down the right person to ask. I was sick, so I shuffled, but it was another excuse to keep moving. They were overwhelmed—often delivering critical care to fragile patients much sicker than I was. Besides, it wasn’t their job to coach me and my struggling family through a series of crises. In fact, it seemed to be nobody’s job.
I was angry, and I was terrified. When I should have been enjoying building a new nest for my reunited family, my mind was filled with worries—money, child care, the stresses on Cesar and my mother (not to mention the likelihood of dying). And I felt abandoned: deprived of the friends and community that could support me, and unseen, in some ways, by the very health care system that held my only hope for survival. There was NO emotional support. No psycho-oncology. It was yet another void in the system.
Dr. Levis could see my frustration and despair. One afternoon he stopped by my fifth-floor room in the leukemia unit, where I was hooked up for that day’s seemingly endless drip-drip-drip of chemo. I was feeling overwhelmed, and way past fed up. I wanted nothing more than to rip that IV out of my chest and walk out of the ward. If it weren’t for the fact that my son needed me back alive, I was ready to surrender and give up. I was exhausted and running on fumes. I was on death’s doorstep and almost ready to say, “take me.” After all, I’d pushed myself to ridiculous lengths to keep myself healthy, and now it seemed like that wasn’t worth a damn.
But that day, Dr. Levis said something that turned my world around. What he said became the biggest story of my career. It was my breaking news!!! “Instead of being angry about how you laid the seeds of your illness with your sleep deprivation and stress or how healthy you lived your life before you got here, be thankful that you showed up fit,” he suggested. “Be grateful that you showed up prepared. One of our biggest challenges in healthcare is how patients present. We can have all the advancements in the world, but if a patient isn’t fit enough to take it, it does no good.”
Be grateful? Was this guy for real? I thought to myself.
“Look around you when you walk through the halls. Not everyone shows up fit enough to fight this disease,” Dr. Levis continued. “You might all have the same subset of leukemia, but you can’t all fight the same.
“If your heart isn’t strong enough, your blood pressure isn’t good enough, your weight isn’t healthy enough, and we have to tiptoe around other health problems, we doctors have to drop your dose of chemo. We can’t kill you trying to save you.”
“We can’t kill you trying to save you.”
You only get as much medicine as you can handle, he was saying. Your dosage depends on your overall fitness . . . . Basically, how you PRESENT.
I was stunned. It was the most profound statement I’d heard in all my time in medical reporting. But I had questions. What about the others? The man in the next room, severely overweight, or the frail woman on an oxygen tank. Another patient had a smoker’s cough, and others were clearly out of shape.
He said, “I can’t tell you because of privacy rules, but you are a smart lady. When you walk the halls, take note of the chemo bags hanging from the IV stands. You will see they are all different sizes.”
I looked at the bag of fluid hanging above me. It was the biggest one on the unit—by far—I knew.
Dr. Levis said, “So trust me when I say I can’t promise that you will live, but I can tell you that your entire life, you prepared for this battle. You did everything physically right.
“You prehabilitated. You ‘presented well,’” he continued, using the phrase for what doctors find they have to work with when a patient shows up needing care. And that means, he says, “you have positioned yourself with the best possible chance to PREVAIL.”
At that moment, the lightbulb came on for me. How we live our lives, how much exercise we do, what we fuel our bodies with, the communities we build—and our habits around stress, spirituality, and finances—will help determine how well each of us can fight when it’s our turn to step into the ring.
“You prehabilitated. You ‘presented well.’”
Dr. Levis’s words brought me calm and gave me a sense of control that I deeply needed. One that people desperately need during COVID. I finally understood that I had a good start, and I was determined to prevail. I would get through this and survive.
Wow! I had stumbled onto the biggest news story of my career! A story that somehow, I had never covered, in all my years of transformational health, fitness, and medical reporting for viewers. This story was way bigger than me. I wanted to shout it from the mountaintop:
Fitness is not just about getting into your skinny jeans, and it may not even successfully prevent illness. News flash—bad things can still happen to you! What matters is how well YOU prepare yourself, and the support systems you put in place.
I thank God every single day that I showed up prepared. I was the clean-eating, green-drinking yoga enthusiast. The on-air transformational health coach. I may have laid the groundwork for my illness with my lack of sleep, but physically my body was so ready for a fight.
You must take an active role in how you “pre-habilitate” because if you don’t, your body will do it for you and you won’t be ready. I’m either your coach or your cautionary tale. You have the chance to be your own hero and start today. The choice is yours. Prepare, by staying fit. Present well, and prevail. The three Ps!
Once again, the doctor told me, “Put your armor on, focus, and fight hard.” This time I knew what to do, and I knew it was up to me to share that discovery with the world. Then and there, from my hospital bedside, I raised the battle cry of ArmorUp for LIFE.
I believed that if I sat still in my room, I’d just wither away and die like so many others. I also believed that, as a well-educated reporter who researched the power of exercise and prehabilitation, I had an obligation to alert other patients. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror if I didn’t. Now, it brings me great joy to speak to patients and educate them about the power of prehabilitation.
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