Her Victory Is a Victory for Us All

If it weren’t for a hiking trip, Nancy Santoro might not have gotten the early diagnosis that saved her life.

About five years ago, Santoro began to notice that she bruised every time her dogs jumped on her.

She was getting older, she told herself. And bruises come easy to an active woman like herself.

She felt great: no pain. No fatigue. So she signed up for a weekend hiking expedition in the High Desert with her husband, Carm, and friends. The excursion included a “ropes course” that would teach them to “face life’s tests and fears,” says Santoro, 59, a longtime Laguna Beach resident.

Oh, the irony of it, she says now.

“During one of the exercises, you do this Tarzan thing, where you push off a cliff and swing from one side of a ravine to the other,” she says. “At one point, when I was thrusting myself forward, my right leg got hung up. I sprained my ankle.”

Back home the following day, Nancy decided to get her ankle checked out. “Carm and I were leaving for a trip to the Far East in a few days, and I knew we’d be doing a lot of walking,” she says.

It was a hot day, so she threw on some shorts so “the doctor could easily see my leg” and headed for a walk-in clinic.

Santoro learned she had a severe sprain. “But what’s going on with those bruises on your thighs?” the doctor asked.

She explained about the dogs.

The doctor recommended a blood work-up. “Something serious could be going on.”

The tests revealed that her platelet count (discs in the blood that assist clotting) were low. She was referred to a hematologist.

“Can’t this wait?” she asked, worried now, but trying to shake it. “I’m about to take a trip.”

“ ‘Young lady, with a platelet count like that I wouldn’t be going anywhere,’ ” she says the doctor told her.

Santoro called her doctor at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. More blood work. A bone marrow biopsy.

And then the moment she’ll never forget: “My doctor put his arm around me and referred me to an oncologist” at the St. Joseph Hospital Regional Cancer Center.

Diagnosis: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the disease that in 1994 would take the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Santoro was stunned--but reassured when she learned that her early diagnosis might save her life.

“But the bad news was it was in my bone marrow and my platelet count was going down by the hour,” she says. “They said it was so low that if I’d gotten on a plane to Tokyo, I might have bled to death because of the pressure changes in the airplane.”

And so began the fight--the tests, hospitalizations, chemotherapy--and the victory that would lead Santoro to where she was Saturday night: on stage with her husband at the Anaheim Hilton & Towers being honored at a benefit for the St. Joseph Hospital Regional Cancer Center.

The Santoros are so grateful for the treatment Nancy Santoro received at St. Joseph they have pledged $500,000. They are also chairpersons of the center’s $4.2-million fund-raising campaign for its renovation and new, 24-bed inpatient unit.

“People ask, ‘Why are you doing this, spending all this time?’ after all we’ve been through,” says Carm Santoro, former CEO of Silicon Systems Inc. and Platinum Software Corp. “And I say to them, ‘What would you do if you were asked? How much value do you place on the life of someone you care about?’ ”

Carm Santoro recalls that gut-wrenching day in 1992 when he’d left his wife’s bedside to go across the street for a hot dog. “I sat there, asking myself, ‘Is it time to make funeral arrangements?’ Things really looked bleak. When I think of her then--and today--well, it was an incredible feat.”

Nancy Santoro owes her life to “the technology that was available,” Carm Santoro says. “But it was also due to the care she had. Since I grew up in the technology business, I know you can buy technology,” he says. “But you can’t buy care. People with a positive mental attitude were with Nancy all of the time--from the doctor who saw her once a day, seven days a week, to the chief nurses who were there for her.”

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When Nancy Santoro learned that Onassis had lymphoma, she sent her a letter of encouragement. “I have been so troubled by the fact that she didn’t survive. She was so strong--had all the money in the world to get the best medical care. All I’ve been able to learn is that her diagnosis was a late one. It made me very sad.”

These days, Nancy Santoro is busy planning a party next year to mark her 60th birthday and her fifth year of being in remission.

“I’ve come to appreciate having birthdays. When I turned 50, I thought ‘Oh my God.’ Then, when I thought I might not get to celebrate my 55th birthday, things became a whole lot different.”