Picturing a Cure for Cancer

When Joyce Ostin’s life was stripped to its raw essence, she lay on a hospital bed hooked up to a machine bombarding her with high-dose chemotherapy. In her isolation she focused on a vision. She could see the eyes of her children.

“My children, my children. All I cared about was to be with my children. . . . I realized then that I was here to raise my three little girls.”

When Ostin talks about “here,” she means on this Earth, alive. She calls herself a survivor after living through two brutal treatment regimens for breast cancer, the last leaving no sign of the disease.

Now, she is on a mission to raise $1 million for the Miracles and Wonder Foundation, which she has created to raise money for breast and ovarian cancer research. She wants to support the work of Dr. Dennis Slamon, who led the way in developing a breakthrough drug called Herceptin, which attempts to attack breast cancer at its genetic roots.

Today, when her life is full and swarming with children, when she looks stylishly petite in her low-rise pants and tank top that shows off a sliver of midriff, when she is promoting her new book of celebrity photos called “Hollywood Moms”--explaining how the proceeds will support the kind of research she believes saved her life--it’s hard to tell that visions from her hospital isolation room simmer under the surface.

But they do.

It was in her weakest moment in that tiny room in the 10th-floor oncology ward at UCLA Medical Center that she found the passion that drives her charitable work today.

The cancer, she said, turned her into a “Warrior Woman. . . . As sick and as weak as I was, I knew I needed to get through it for my girls.”

There are three of them: Anika, 12, Leyla, 10, and little Annabelle, 8, who loves bedtime stories.

Three more girls in a family seemingly stalked by breast cancer. Ostin’s mother died of the disease. Her mother-in-law survived it. Her sister, too, was diagnosed with it. Two friends have died from it.

And at age 38, Ostin learned of her disease.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh God, we need a break, these girls can’t keep thinking women are bald all the time in the family,’ ” Ostin said.

She had a mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy, but three years later the cancer returned. This time it was heavy-duty chemotherapy, the newly approved Herceptin and stem-cell marrow replacement. She came home from a monthlong hospital stay only to return with a high fever from toxins the chemotherapy left in her lungs.

Finally, more medication drove the fever down. Soon after, she took her first walk on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. “I would look out into the ocean and say, ‘Thank you, dear God, for my life.’ ”

One of her first outings was dinner with a friend, Nathalie Marciano, the kind of close friend who has the nerve to ask a question like this: Now that you are alive and well, what are you going to give back?

“I hadn’t looked at it that way,” Ostin confessed. “I was alive and that was enough for me.”

It was Marciano who suggested that Ostin put her photography hobby to work. Ostin turned to motherhood as the theme.

Joyce Ostin, much like the name of her book, is a Hollywood Mom. She lives with her husband, DreamWorks Records executive Michael Ostin, in a Brentwood mansion.

Every Saturday morning, her daughters go over to grandma and grandpa’s house for breakfast. Grandpa is Mo Ostin, the legendary chairman of Warner Bros. record label. Grandma is Evelyn Ostin.

So many of her friends and friends of her friends are beautiful and famous Hollywood women that when she decided on a book about celebrity moms and daughters, the yeses came rolling in: Kate Capshaw, Rachel Hunter and Ellen Barkin were first in line.

With 90,000 copies of her book in print and syndication rights being sold in at least two other countries, Ostin figures she is well on the way to raising her $1 million.

Somehow, that number sounds right, an amount that “will make a difference.” Lately, she’s been on the talk-show circuit--answering questions about what it was like to shoot Madonna and Lourdes, Jennifer and Guadalupe Lopez, Melanie Griffith and Stella Banderas.

But talk with Ostin in her kitchen, where she offers herb tea and a tray of fine pastries, and the conversation is not about celebrities or her lifestyle, but life.

“I think there is a lucid reality you are awakened to when you go through something like this,” she explained calmly, as if it’s something she has contemplated over and over. “You go to the UCLA boiler room, and you see all these sickly-looking people. No one knows who is going to be alive shortly after this. . . . It was a time when I could clearly see what was important in my life and what was not.”

When the book tour is over, when the Hollywood questions fade, after she has made her payment to society, she will find life’s nourishment in her mom routine.

There’s getting the girls up and ready for school, and after school there is ice cream, dance and homework.

“Usually at night, we all go to my bed, and I read or tell them stories. My little one loves this story about a dolphin, and I make up how this dolphin visits all these different islands in the sea,” she said. “And then, well, I usually just stay there with them until they fall asleep.”