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I said that a cure was on the table. They were also anxious to take the test to see if they might be a match. Telling Mom was much more difficult. She’d been battling her own health issues, and the last year had been hard. She had high blood pressure, arthritis and a heart condition. She’d had a knee replacement that didn’t go well. It was hard to explain to her over the phone that I had this mysterious, rare illness that most people couldn’t spell or really pronounce. I gave Mom the broad strokes—I had a secondary illness to the breast cancer, I was going to bring home swab kits to test Dorothy and Sally-Ann and, most important, the doctors thought that they could cure me. That was all my sweet, eighty-eight-year-old mother needed to know.
    Deborah Roberts, my ABC news colleague, Gayle King from CBS, Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s wife) and Theresa Moore (a friend from my ESPN days) started what they call “Robin’s lunch” when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. It was a way for them to keep an eye on me and see for themselves how I was doing. Every few months we still get together to discuss life, our families and just a smidge of the latest gossip. Just the five of us, no one else. Many have tried to invite themselves to join us over the years, but we prefer the intimacy of a small group and the history we share together. The one and only time we broke our rule and let someone else have lunch with us was my mom!
    It was at one of our luncheons that I told the group about my MDS diagnosis. Tonya had just gotten emotional talking about how thankful they all were that I was doing well and had survived cancer. It was such a sweet moment that I didn’t want to ruin it by telling them what I was about to face. But I knew it would be difficult for us all to get together again before I went public with the news. So I waited until the end of our lunch and quietly told them. We hugged, we cried and we knew we would always be there for one another.
    Though my friends never felt that way—that I was the “what now?” friend—I cannot tell you how many hours I spent in needless worry about being a burden. Oh, gosh, that’s one thing that’s changed in the past year. I know—with my head and my heart—that life is too precious to fritter away so much of it with needless worry.
    I remember in 2007 when I called my good friend Jo after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. She and Kim, also one of my closest friends, were very upset.
    Jo was crying and I said, “It’s okay, Joey.”
    She said, “I just can’t deal with this, Robbie Rob.”
    She and Kim call me Robbie Rob.
    I tried to calm her down and said again, “It’ll be okay.”
    She said, “It’s just too much. I was just talking with my mom and my dad. He is facing a health crisis, too, and now you.”
    I listened and expressed my sympathy for her dad.
    Then Jo said, “This has been a really bad week for me.”
    And I said, “A bad week for you??? Um, yeah, Joey, things have been a little worse for me.”
    That made us both laugh because I knew what she meant. It was terrible to hear that your father and your best friend each got a bad diagnosis during the same week. But when I thought of that conversation, I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to call Jo and share this kind of news again.”
    But I did. And because they are such amazing friends, Jo and Kim drove down from Maine and met me and Amber at my home in Connecticut. We sat out in the backyard that Saturday night and just spent hours talking and crying. All four of us were big crybabies. I remember Kim was just inconsolable. I was a basket case, too. They were just so angry that I was going through this again. They knew how serious it was the first time, and they just wanted to be able to take on some of it for me.
    But the best part of the evening was that there were whole hours when we sat around the fire pit and didn’t say a word. We were together as a group, but they knew I needed