May 4, 2007
The potential for trouble with Tony Snow’s return to work
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow returned to work this week after five weeks off after being diagnosed with a reoccurrence of the colon cancer he first faced in 2005. Snow is back at work and he plans to continue doing his high profile job while undergoing months of chemotherapy, and while he should be applauded for this, I have some concerns about how this will work out.
Snow’s condition is considered terminal, but he plans to face it as if he has a chronic illness; continuing treatment to hopefully hold the cancer at bay with regular maintenance doses of the chemo once his initial round of treatment is finished. He wants to continue doing his job and go about living his life, and that’s really the only way you can face something as imposing and frightening as cancer.
Still he’s chosen a very difficult path with his decision to continue speaking for Our Fine President, and I’m not talking about his regular duties dodging media attempts to get answers about what the government is up to and trying to make statements from “The Commander Guy” sound as if they came from an adult. I’m talking about the difficulty in staying focused on work tasks while undergoing the horrible help that comes from chemotherapy.
I know this from my personal experience returning to work as a news reporter while undergoing the final round of chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. My experience is certainly a smaller scale parallel of what Snow will face in just about every way. Hodgkin’s is one of the most curable cancers and seven years later my condition is considered cured, and while I can’t be certain about this, I imagine the chemo drugs he’ll be receiving for his colon cancer will be much stronger poisons than those I had pumped into my system to kill my cancer before it killed me.
Still, I think my experience offers me a bit of insight into the situation facing Snow and it makes me give a lot of thought to the implications of someone in a position as important as Snow’s facing a similar situation.
Chemotherapy is often the most effective thing for cancer, but it’s far from a perfect treatment. The doctor who came up with the idea of poisoning a sick person in the hope of killing the sickness before it or the poison kill the patient must have gotten some strange looks when first presenting the plan. But, that’s chemo.
You get plugged into an IV and caustic substances are sent on down your veins. Some of the chemicals are quickly injected from a large syringe, but others require a slow pumping process that can take hours. All of them feel awful as soon as they hit your system, and the foul taste they paint on the back of your throat is an indomitable presence throughout treatment. Then of course there’s the little fact that the drugs’ initial affects make you feel worse than you already did from the cancer.
My treatments came once a week and I was not very functional for the two days after taking them. I’d feel better as the week went on after those initial days, and the treatment did make me feel better on those days than I’d felt prior to the start of treatment. Of course, it was a little hard to tell if that was for real. I was also taking a wide range of other medications, so there were lots of clashing symptoms and side effects, and I’d been sick for months before starting treatment so I’d sort of lost track of just what feeling normal or healthy was.
Snow is supposed to have his first treatment Monday and I imagine he’ll not be working every day of the week during treatment, but I’m not surprised he’s going to work throughout his treatment. He knows what to expect. Sure, chemo was a nasty process I hope to never repeat, but cancer treatment and detection constantly improves and I figure the next time the medicine will either be a little less noxious or a little more effective if not a lot of both.
Snow has expressed a similar attitude about this, telling the NY Times, “Cancer frightens so many people that they don’t realize the treatment for the disease and the prognosis and the pace of innovation is so much different than we experienced when we were kids. There are folks out there who, they hear the word `cancer’ and they freak out, and they don’t need to do that anymore.”
But, unfortunately that’s exactly the problem with the situation Snow will find himself in. People do freak out about cancer. It’s common enough and deadly enough that just about every has experienced it in some tangential way. With its many and mysterious causes, cancer is all the more ominous. I did plenty of comforting and calming family and friends while I was sick. Some of that was due to the fact I was 25 when I started chemo, but I imagine Snow has faced plenty of the same from panicked and concerned loved ones.
People treat you differently when they know you have cancer, and it was hard not to feel as if I were entitled to special treatment or something extra because I was sick. My chemotherapy lasted 12 weeks and I returned to work during the final four weeks, and continued to work through an additional month of daily radiation treatments. I didn’t want to go back to work that soon, but my doctor pushed for it, and who was I to question his orders.
The newspaper chain I worked for was extremely accommodating, with the executive editor arranging to temporarily transfer me to the bureau closest to my doctor so it would be easiest for me to continue receiving my treatments. Of course that meant I took over another reporter’s beat and I met a whole new set of officials to cover with the burden of explaining just why I was transferred to their part of the world.
I was straight forward about the reason I was there because earning trust from sources is important, and I always believed in being as up front as possible with the people I covered. Obviously, Snow knew he could hardly keep this a secret and he’s been very forthcoming with his experiences as he deals with what must obviously be a very difficult and emotional time. He’s been trying to allay fears about cancer while presenting himself as an example of how far treatment has progressed.
It would be great if the White House spokesman could convey both of his intended messages about this, but it also paints him as a very sympathetic figure in a position where that might not be a good idea. It might just be because I’m wearing my most cynical hat right now, but I’m concerned.
I’m not really worried about Snow using cancer as an excuse not to do his job. Since he basically stands in front of the White House press corp and finds ways to avoid, misdirect and repel their questions, having to leave early due to illness wouldn’t really disrupt his regular work. Instead, my concerns are about how the already docile White House press corp will treat Snow.
When I started on that new beat everyone was extremely nice and overly helpful. Phone calls to sources were returned in record time and information I asked about was readily provided. Sure there were no major scandals breaking on that beat, but I quickly got used to the ease of operating in that type of environment and started to take advantage of it and the unquestionable excuse of being sick.
There’s already reports of press corp reporters wearing cancer wristbands with Snow’s name on them. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with this, but reporters covering the White House have to be careful that their empathy for Snow does not lead to even shoddier reporting. They’re already doing a terrible job covering a most secretive, duplicitous and misleading administration, and the thought of them abdicating even more of their responsibility due to pity for poor sick Tony is a fright of its own.
As a reporter you get to know your regular sources on a number of levels and you often get the best professional information from conversations that also stray onto much more personal topics. Still, reporters must draw the line at becoming friends with sources, and however much they care about Snow and hope he can beat this, they must treat him as if he were not sick and press him for all the answers they’d normally not ask him for. The press corp has been slowly improving their tenacity and effectiveness and it would be a shame if Snow’s cancer is an excuse to stop pressing for answers the public deserves.