Leap of Fate : Former Javelin Champion Schmidt Gets an Early Start on Battle Against Ovarian Cancer

In a random, isolated, freakish leap forward in the early detection of ovarian cancer, a dog bound into Kate Schmidt’s lap last summer and became woman’s best friend.

More than likely because of Bubba, a mutt of indistinguishable pedigree, Schmidt’s is a story of recovery, not an obituary.

In too many cases, ovarian cancer takes no prisoners. It is neither star struck nor judgmental. It devoured comedienne Gilda Radner without remorse and had Schmidt in its cross hairs--germ cells multiplying at hideous rates--as it swelled into a tumor the size of a honeydew melon. As with the others, cancer did not pause to consider its victim, in this case Schmidt, a two-time Olympic javelin bronze medalist and holder of the American women’s record at 227 feet 5 inches.

Sometimes in life you need luck, plain and simple.

Schmidt was camping with friends in the Sequoias when Bubba, whom she had rescued from the pound, returned the favor when he took the garden variety dog’s leap into her lap.

One of his paws hit a sore spot.

“It wasn’t a very bad pain,” Schmidt remembers. “But it was just in the wrong place.”

Upon her return home to Los Angeles, Schmidt phoned a general practitioner. Two days later, Aug. 7, she was being prepped for surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital, where she would remain for 21 days.

Friends such as Mike Tully, Dan Ripley, Debbie Brill, Maren Seidler, Cindy Gilbert, Patty Van Wolvelaere kept her company.

They came as Schmidt’s hair fell out in clumps during four, week-long sessions of chemotherapy. In a friend’s back yard, Schmidt ordered that her head be shaved as she wondered, jokingly, whether anyone would notice with the appropriate application of earrings and makeup.

When she felt too ill to attend her induction into Long Beach State’s Hall of Fame, her father, E.V., stepped up to pinch-hit.

Others rallied to defray medical costs. Schmidt was changing medical insurance companies at the time of her surgery and was not covered. She will probably be paying off the balance--estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars--for the rest of her life, maybe beyond.

As if cancer weren’t enough to lose sleep over.

Rather than accept the

disease as a vehicle of death, however, she has found daily affirmation.

“I never really got afraid,” says the 40-year-old Schmidt, her cancer now in remission. “I never really felt it was life-threatening. But it put all the good stuff in a little better focus. It reminded me how great everything really is. I’d never taken for granted how great it was. . . .

“I’m a big fan of my own life. It just reminded me, in the back of my head. I have that little voice, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When is the recurrence going to happen? You try not to pay attention or listen to it, but it’s there. That’s probably what enables everything to crystallize. A pretty day is way prettier than it ever was. And a happy dog is way happier than it ever was.”

Schmidt considers herself blessed. Initially, she was told she would need six chemotherapy sessions--”I can’t describe what it feels to wake up in a pool of chemo to anybody other than someone who has gone through it”--but needed only four treatments to knock the cancer out for now.

Of course, she knows this isn’t measles. According to American Cancer Society figures, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer is 39%.

Schmidt is unaware of that particular statistic and does not wish to be overly informed.

“I don’t look at numbers,” she says. “I feel like I don’t have cancer anymore. That’s how I want to live my life. I want to stay in touch, I don’t want to slip into some sort of fog of denial about it, but I want to feel as good as I can feel every day.”

She is slowly regaining the energy that once made her a vibrant figure in track and field.

Always a free spirit, Schmidt never accepted coaching. She was a natural-born “slinger” who shunned conventional technique.

She once had the five longest American javelin tosses. Her throw of 227-5, at the time a world record, is the longest-standing American track and field mark in the books.

She made her mark Sept. 11, 1977, at Furth, West Germany, and will be remembered as much for the post-record party rampage through town, during which she left few beer steins unturned.

Schmidt’s lust for life and intellectual curiosity, along with her trademark pink ’63 Rambler American, would steer her into an interesting coterie of friends, among them screenwriter Robert Towne (“Chinatown,”) and Sergio Premoli, an Italian playwright.

Cancer or no, Schmidt has lost little of that vigor.

She is recouping hair follicles and has regained most of the 30 pounds she lost.

After two months away from work, she is back into her career as a certified personal trainer, specializing in post-surgical aquatics rehabilitation--a business she started in 1983.

On May 7, she quietly--and gingerly--completed a 5-kilometer race, a fund raiser for UCLA’s women’s breast and ovarian cancer research program.

It marked the nine-month anniversary of her surgery, performed by Richard Nalick--a former javelin thrower at UCLA.

“Right away, I knew I was OK,” Schmidt says. “After I heard that, nothing else mattered.”

Because of a dog’s timely leap, Schmidt and her doctors are optimistic about her prognosis.

“There is no test for it,” Schmidt says. “It’s not detectable. It’s usually not found until the third and fourth stage. Mine was found in the first stage, with possible third stage because the tumor had ruptured. Sort of cancer on the loose. That’s why I had the chemotherapy. But the tumor was first stage, so it’s really treatable.”

For the detection, Schmidt thanks not a doctor, but a dog.

Had Bubba not taken his fateful leap?

“The tumor would have kept growing,” she says. “And it was growing very fast. Bubba saved my life, because I saved his at the pound.”

Schmidt attends weekly meetings at the Wellness Community in Pasadena, where she shares her secrets with other cancer patients.

“It’s changed my life only for the better,” she says of her ordeal. “Cancer has a horrible reputation, and I’ll be the first to admit it’s a crappy disease, but it’s so much more manageable now than it ever was before.”

Every now and then, though, darkness overpowers optimism.

Recently, a friend from the Wellness Community had a recurrence of her ovarian cancer.

“We had our surgeries the same time,” Schmidt says. “And it’s very serious. That’s frightening to me. It’s a very close-to-home reminder, how fast it can get you. She had a perfectly good blood test two months ago. Now, it doesn’t look good.”

Down cycles are to be expected.

“It wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t have periods like that anyway, whether it’s about cancer or about life,” Schmidt says. “None of the good stuff is worth anything unless there’s the fear and the anger and everything else that we have to overcome constantly. That’s what it’s all about.

“The dramatic stories are the ones that make the news more often than the happy endings in this. I wouldn’t mind being one to say it’s survivable.”