A High Degree of Satisfaction

She was the first in her family to go to college. She had to struggle with all her might to pass a calculus class before she could be admitted to UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management. Then, after just two months of school, it turned out the trouble she was having breathing wasn’t stress but non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“I’d ask God,” she said, “ ‘Why did you get me into business school and then give me cancer?’ It didn’t make sense.”

Despite undergoing surgery and debilitating radiation and chemotherapy that wiped out her hair almost overnight, not only did she seldom miss a class, her extracurricular activities were enough to exhaust a healthy student. She was elected president of the Marketing and Strategy Assn. She was a founder of a social group. She held a job.

On Saturday, Susan Moe will receive her MBA. And after 2 1/2 years of fertility treatments, interrupted by her cancer, when she receives her degree she will be seven months’ pregnant.

“Sometimes I’ll sit in class, and I’ll feel the baby kicking,” she said. “There was a very good chance I might not have this experience. That’s what I think about every time. How lucky I am to experience this.”

Still, she downplays her struggle.

“Everybody has problems in life,” she said. “Maybe someone’s going through a divorce that’s causing emotional pain. I got a lot of sympathy because my issue was exposed to the world by my baldness. It just happened to be my issue of the day.”

Gayle Wilson, former Gov. Pete Wilson’s wife, said that’s the way Moe is. Before going to business school, Moe worked as Gayle Wilson’s scheduler, and the two have stayed in touch. “She’s an amazingly strong woman,” Wilson said. “I’m sure she had difficult moments, but she was just really positive. She’d say, ‘Sure it was going to work out fine and that there must be a reason for this.’ She was amazing, I thought. I don’t think I could have done that.”

Moe, 31, started on her MBA in September 1998. By October, the pain in her chest had become so searing that she had to sleep sitting up. An X-ray showed a shadow on her lungs. A CT scan showed a tumor underneath her sternum. The weekend before Thanksgiving she underwent exploratory surgery at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach. She found out she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease of the lymph nodes, the same ailment that killed King Hussein of Jordan last year.

The American Cancer Society estimates about 26,000 people will die from the disease this year. But she was lucky. Doctors had caught the disease at its earliest stage, and it hadn’t spread into the bone marrow.

Moe couldn’t understand how she could have cancer. She was a vegetarian. She ate whole-grain bread. She didn’t smoke and didn’t drink caffeinated beverages. She barely drank alcohol. She worked out.

Fertility Treatments Are Placed on Hold

Just after Thanksgiving, as finals approached, she started chemotherapy. The cancer and the treatment would be bad enough, but it also meant an end to the fertility treatments Moe had started two years earlier and a fear that chemotherapy could end any hope of ever getting pregnant.

“I think the biggest disappointment was not that she had cancer,” said her husband, Niklas Moe, a business strategist for Microsoft. “She knew she would be able to fight it, but the doctor said at some point it may have permanent implications on the fertility process and that caused her more harm than anything else.”

Chemotherapy came every three weeks. The first time, she was so sick for a couple of days that she couldn’t get out of the house. Then came the three-week winter break at school. When Moe had started the break, she had shoulder-length, brown hair. When she returned to class, she was bald from the chemotherapy. Her hair had fallen out in two days. Most of the time she would wear a hat or a scarf. Word of her illness had gotten around, but she wasn’t worried about her appearance.

“The first year of business school is so intense and so busy, there’s no time to be self-conscious,” she said.

She bought a wig that she wore mainly for job interviews. One day she was shopping at Nordstrom when a sales clerk remarked how beautiful her hair was and wondered what color it was.

Moe said, “Let me check,” and without thinking, she pulled off the wig to look at the tag. “She nearly died,” Moe said. “I was completely thoughtless.”

Moe had e-mailed her professors about her disease, but didn’t ask to be treated differently. “The impressive thing is she actually acted completely naturally,” said Marta Elvira, an assistant professor of organizational behavior. “She didn’t use her sickness as an excuse, which I find very noble.”

The chemo ended in March 1999, and then four weeks of daily radiation treatments.

“It makes you very, very tired,” Moe said. “It’s an exhaustion that’s hard to imagine.”

For someone who has boundless energy and enthusiasm when healthy, the feeling was as frustrating as the disease. “I felt I probably wasn’t learning as much as I could if I was 100% healthy,” she said. With the chemo over, her hair began to grow back. This time, though, it was curly. “I had permed my hair through the ‘80s,” she said. “Now I got the real thing for free.

During the cancer treatments, business school students pitched in to help. People she hardly knew e-mailed their customized study guides. “Had these guys not done that, I probably wouldn’t have passed finals,” she said. “I wasn’t able to dedicate the time everyone else would to integrate the information and learn in.”

Another student, Malik Sharif, made her visualization tapes, a common cancer treatment where the patient imagines the disease leaving the body. His wife gave her treatments of Reiki, a New Age therapy to focus the body’s energy.

Moe seldom took it easy. She continued her work in myriad clubs at the business school and took a job at a Tustin dot-com. “They even hired me when I was bald,” she said. “They didn’t ask about it.”

By the end of summer, Moe had been free of cancer for five months. Her oncologist told her it was OK to start the fertility treatments again.

In December, the doctor called. She was pregnant. “I lay on the ground and cried for 1 1/2 hours,” she said. “I felt such a profound sense of humility. I felt it was a direct answer to my prayers by God.”

After graduation, Moe will move to Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft has transferred her husband. And then she will have the baby. Then she’ll see about job opportunities in the area.

Asked about her pregnancy, she said the cancer had prepared her for morning sickness. “I got curly hair and a very high tolerance for nausea.”