It was what Lynise would calla bonus day. Not a happy day or memorable in a pleasant way. Rather, it was just a day that the sun came up and she was there to see it. She had a difficult job ahead, but after all that she and Carolyn had gone through, it was the least she could do.
So on that bonus day in late April 2004, Channel 4 TV reporter Lynise Weeks, who has battled years of debilitating illnesses related to diabetes, lupus and kidney disease, went to the Golden Gate Funeral Home on Milwaukee’s North Side and gave the eulogy at the funeral of Carolyn McGee, her good friend who at just 47 had died of kidney failure, a disease they shared. It was one of the hardest things Lynise recalls ever doing, a reminder of just how close to the precipice she stands every day.
Lynise had just seen her friend days earlier in Madison, where she’d been hospitalized. Though Lynise wasn’t well either, and Carolyn objected, she made the drive anyway. They had a wonderful afternoon watching TV talk shows, laughing and talking about their plans for the future. For Lynise, those plans included going on a safari and writing a book about children on dialysis. Carolyn supported Lynise, and in turn Lynise supported her in a way that none of their other friends could have understood, because they shared with each other the exhilaration and devastation of organ transplant and failure.
Just three months before, Lynise had been forced to have her own transplanted kidneys removed because they were slowly poisoning her. Just as Lynise’s transplanted organs began to fail, Carolyn received her second kidney. With it, she gave Lynise hope that she’d have a second chance as well.
The women met in 2002 at the kidney dialysis center on Capitol Drive near Lynise’s job at WTMJ. Carolyn had been on dialysis since the failure of her first kidney transplant years earlier. For Lynise, accepting that she had to give her life over to the punishing routine of kidney dialysis was crushing. She’d done everything in her power to avoid it.
But the first day at the dialysis center, there wasCarolyn with a pleasant hello. Despite Lynise’s enthusiastic on-air persona, she just wanted to be left alone that day. “I just wanted to sit in the corner and cry,” says Lynise.
Prior to each dialysis session, nurses weighed patients, and Carolyn’s chair was next to the scale. “She would always say ‘Hi’ and try to exchange some pleasantries. I wasn’t very friendly,” says Lynise. But Carolyn’s good nature won her over and they became fast friends.
Now the ally who bolstered her through some dark days and who gave her hope was gone. “Looking at her in the coffin,” says Lynise, “I saw myself.”
Such a reflection is a rare admission of Lynise’s deepest fear, for she has never viewed her myriad health problems as an end game. Even a year after her friend’s death, a year in which she has endured complication upon complication, Lynise cheerfully says, “I feel blessed to be alive.”
She not only faced dashed hopes for another transplant, she had a near miss with death in mid-May, when, weakened by an allergic reaction to medicine and a bout with peritonitis, she developed a perforated bowel that required emergency surgery. In early June, she relapsed again and was put on a ventilator for nearly a week. Lynise rallied briefly one more time, but by the end of June was seriously ill with another bowel abscess. She had grown immune to even the most powerful antibiotics used to fight her infections. Friends say she still talked of the fight but was finally acknowledging that her bonus days were fewer and fewer. Still, she was hopeful.
“Every day is a bonus when you open your eyes and can thank God for another day,” says Lynise from her hospital bed in the intensive care ward at Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital a few days after her close call in May. “But it’s taken me a long time to see that.”
For the longest time, Lynise fought acceptance of her diagnosis. Her fight, which propelled her out of a tough neighborhood into one of the country’s top journalism schools and into the homes of thousands of Milwaukeeans every night, is the same drive that has kept her going with a resiliency that has astounded her doctors, nurses, family and friends.
In early spring, she agreed to go on permanent disability leave from her job to concentrate on fighting her diseases. She had planned to move to assisted living to hopefully regain a semblance of good health and await another transplant. But the complications ancillary to her diseases sapped what strength remained of this formidable 41-year-old woman who at one time taught aerobics and once ran the Chicago Marathon. By the end of June, Lynise had been in the hospital nearly four months.
No matter what the future holds, Lynise will no doubt address it on her own, controlling terms. To her, these health problems are not dead ends but roadblocks, another hurdle to leap. “[TMJ anchor] Mike [Jacobs] always says I look at things through rose-colored glasses,” she says. “That is what has gotten me from point A to point B. In my dreams, I was there.”
Those dreams started early. And despite family discord, academic setbacks and a childhood spent in near poverty, they never dimmed. In fact, she was driven – some would argue almost compulsively – to achieve largely because of her troubled upbringing.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Lynise is the eldest of four children. She says her father, Herbert, a Korean War vet with a drinking problem, was a malingerer who didn’t provide emotional or financial support for his family. His alcoholism and laziness, says his daughter, were prime motivating factors. “I didn’t want that for my life. I wanted to run as far away from that as possible,” she says.
Lynise’s mother, Barbara, who worked as an administrative aide for the New York City Police Department, provided for the family. Herbert drifted in and out of the house until Lynise was about 12 and her parents finally divorced, an event she describes as a relief. “I still wanted a dad but was able to finally let out my breath because I didn’t have to be the peacemaker anymore. My mom and dad fought all the time, and I was always in the middle.”
Until she was about 11, Lynise alternated between wanting to be the 1970s TVicon “The Bionic Woman” and an airline stewardess, recall her mother and sister Lynette. But around the time her parents divorced, she discovered her true passion. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in her neighborhood, she gave a speech to the church community. A fellow churchgoer complimented her on her delivery and poise, and those simple words of encouragement became the driving force in her dream to become a TV news reporter.
Soon she began to idolize Chi Chi Williams, a reporter for Channel 7 in New York and then the only black, female on-camera reporter in the Big Apple. Lynise’s mother says she couldn’t understand why an 11-year-old would be so interested in the news. But watching the evening news became the can’t-miss event of the day for Lynise, who would study Williams’ wardrobe and on-camera delivery.
For high school, Lynise attended the New York School of Printing in Manhattan. After graduation, her mother encouraged her to take the civil service exam. Passing it would make her eligible for any variety of civil service positions – jobs that provided secure, if uninspiring employment. Lynise would have none of it, steadfastly refusing to take the exam and instead enrolling as a communications major at the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island. “No one in my family had gone to college,” she says. “My mom’s dream was for me to pass the civil service exam. She was afraid I was going to be very disappointed. She tried to prepare me with a backup.”
While a full-time student, Lynise held down a full-time second-shift job at a nearby White Castle Restaurant, where she flipped burgers and waited tables. After graduation, she applied and was rejected from the graduate journalism program at the University of Missouri. Lynise blames her abysmal performance on the GRE exams. She then landed a job as a gofer at CBS News in Manhattan, where she did everything from feeding Dan Rather’s fish to typing the late Charles Kuralt’s scripts for the “Sunday Morning” program.
While at CBS, she discovered that many of the people for whom she fetched coffee were Missouri journalism grads. She implored them to write letters on her behalf to help her get admitted. Again the graduate school said no, but admissions counselors offered her a spot as an undergraduate. Lynise accepted, and after a semester reapplied to the graduate program. Again she was rejected. The school wanted her to retake the GRE. Lynise refused. Instead, she put on a burgundy pinstriped suit her mother made for her and visited every person on the admissions board to personally plead her case. That was the charm.
It was at Missouri in the mid-1980s that Lynise’s New York chutzpa became her trademark. Her self-assured, in-your-face style was somewhat jolting to Midwesterners, recalls Kent Collins, one of her professors at Missouri and currently head of the school’s broadcasting department. “She was a powerful young woman even then. Her expectations of herself were high. She wanted to produce a lot, do more stories, better stories. She was the one everyone in the class was chasing,” he explains.
She also made sure people noticed her. “Lynise would come to class in a rush usually a few minutes late, charge in and sit down with some modest fanfare,” says Collins. He also recalls that one of her favorite tricks was to park her car in the fire lane in front of the building with the emergency blinkers flashing. “When questioned, she would dismiss the inquirer with the reply that ‘she was on assignment for KOMU’[the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Missouri, and the university’s broadcast teaching facility]. She rang up a record number of parking tickets.”
Lynise notes with no small amount of pride that upon graduation, the school that had thrice rejected her offered her a fellowship.
In a business where telegenic presence is a key ingredient for success or failure, Lynise made her mark based on energy. A plus-size woman – nearly 5 feet 11 inches in bare feet – Lynise declares that what got her ahead was her work ethic. “I could outwork anyone,” she says. “I may not be Miss America, but I can outwork Miss America.”
It is precisely because of her appearance and willingness to share her personal story with viewers that friends describe her in Oprahesque terms.
“I don’t mean her any disrespect,” says former WTMJ co-worker Lynn Sprangers, “but she is comfortable with her size and skin. She represents something Milwaukeeans like. [People here] have a great BSdetector, and viewers feel a façade. She is very open about her health problems. Her life is an open book. She is everything you see on TV.”
Sprangers notes that when she worked as an on-air reporter, viewers always greeted her warmly. But, she says, Lynise’s fans took their devotion to a higher level. “She is like a rock star,” says Sprangers, but an approachable rock star, one who would respond to almost all of the calls and inquiries from viewers – from news tips to answering questions about the type of lipstick she wore, recalls her former producer, Jennie Fox.
In fact, Lynise’s fan appeal is how friend Patti Baldwin discovered what the woman she met at an aerobics class did for a living. They went shopping together at Mayfair Mall and people kept looking at Lynise, says the petite and white Baldwin, who thought it was because the duo made such an odd-looking couple. “Someone finally came up and asked her for her autograph. That’s when I finally found out what she did. She never flaunted it.”
Her super energylevel is what initially impressed Jeff Kiernan, former managing editor of WTMJ-TV, who hired her away from WWMT in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1993. “She was a woman clearly passionate about her job,” says Kiernan. “You don’t often run across someone with that kind of energy, where it comes across so clearly on tape. She connected with the audience.”
Although her first love was political reporting, at Channel 4 Lynise was given the then nascent consumer affairs beat. She was quickly touted as a station star and given the promotion tag line “Seven Days a Weeks,” a not-so-inflated deduction of her work load. Sprangers recalls that Lynise would sometimes have to be reminded to go home. Fox notes that working with Weeks as producer was intense but joyful. “We laughed a lot and we sweated a lot,” she says. “Day to day, she gave 200 percent. When she came in the door, you knew she was there, and she lifted everyone else in the office.”
The zest she brought to her job carried through to her outside interests: entertaining (she loved to have theme parties), cooking (she entered food contests, once winning a best spaghetti contest with “Lynise’s Love Sauce”), exercising and traveling (she planned to visit all 50 states by the time she reached 50). “Traveling with Lynise is fun,” says Baldwin, “because she always asks for the upgrade. She has no problem with that, and her point of embarrassment is pretty high. When you travel with Lynise, you just sit back and enjoy the ride because she takes care of everything.”
And she has a gift for making friends and bringing those friends together with other friends. In fact, she describes many of her co-workers at WTMJ as family, and it is with these people that she has shared the best and worst of her life. Chief among them is Mike Jacobs. Lynise admits she initially dismissed him as a pretty-faced anchorman. Her first memorable encounter with Jacobs was when he yelled at her to turn down a TVmonitor in the newsroom. Later, he asked her to join his family at a soccer game, an offer she sniffed at. When she asked him later how the game went, Jacobs chided her for missing a good time. She said that maybe next time she’d take him up on a game. “Who says there’ll be another time,” he responded. The quip put her in her place in a way that today she calls Jacobs her best friend, someone who has been like a father.
Lynise says she grew up being “sickeningly healthy.” She rarely missed school and was relatively thin, “with an hour-glass figure,” until her 20s, says her mother.
But the good health she took for granted came to an abrupt halt on Mother’s Day 1999. At Mike and Linda Jacobs’ home for dinner, Jacobs tried to interest Lynise in sampling a Cosmopolitan cocktail he had whipped up. All she wanted was glass after glass of water between frequent trips to the bathroom. Linda, a nurse who works with kidney patients, immediately recognized the symptoms as the onset of diabetes.
With a multi-generational history of the disease – her aunt died from it and her brother and mother, who is also on dialysis, are current sufferers – Lynise was not surprised by the diagnosis. Yet she was determined not to let it change her life. “I decided to live a normal life and be damned the diabetes. But my mom always said that your mouth determines your fate.” While she redoubled her exercise routine, she did not bring the same discipline to her diet. “I loved to eat junk food,” says Lynise. “Hamburgers, ribs, savory foods.”
The diagnosis did not change her plans for a trip that same August to Zion National Park in Utah. Days before leaving, though, she noticed a soreness in her left leg. Dismissing it as overexertion at the gym, she left on her vacation with some pills prescribed for inflammation of joints and muscles. Two days prior to the planned highlight of her trip – a hike to the top of Angels Landing, a strenuous 5-mile, 1,500-foot climb – with the muscle soreness getting worse, her doctor urged her to come home. Lynise climbed the mountain instead. Upon her return, her doctor diagnosed polymyositis, a form of lupus. By October, a urinalysis determined that she was spilling protein into her urine and a biopsy confirmed early-stage kidney disease, a common result of lupus, an autoimmune disease that can attack the kidney as if it is a foreign body.
Her nephrologist, Stephen Sievers, urged her to start on a chemotherapy drug called Cytoxan that would help slow the advance of the kidney disease, allowing her to possibly live 10 more years with her native kidneys. The side effect is that it could leave her sterile. Lynise balked, begging Sievers to give her another year or two. “I didn’t want to do it because I had the dream, like a lot of women in their 30s, of getting married and having children,” says Lynise, who had a boyfriend at the time of her diagnosis, although they later broke up.
For the next two years, Lynise remained relatively healthy. Not so with her mother, who suffered a heart attack. While visiting her in Florida in winter of 2002, Lynise developed a blood clot in her lung and was hospitalized there. After returning, her health rapidly declined, requiring her to finally go on the Cytoxan, begin dialysis and add her name to the kidney transplant list.
There are two types of dialysis options. One is hemodialysis, which uses an artificial kidney machine to remove wastes from the blood and excess fluid from the body. The other is peritoneal dialysis. In this procedure, a small abdominal incision is made and a catheter is inserted through the peritoneal cavity, located outside the intestinal bowel but inside the belly.
Initially, Lynise went on a three-times-a-week hemodialysis routine. But she found the side effects hard to tolerate. And it wasn’t just the usual cramping, dizziness and temporary blood pressure drops associated with dialysis. Sievers says she developed Autonomic Nervous System Dysfunction, which caused profound, prolonged drops in her blood pressure after a hemodialysis session. She eventually switched to the peritoneal dialysis, which she could do several times a day at home or in her office at WTMJ while answering phone calls and typing messages. But it also caused frequent infections.
What was equally difficult to accept were the humiliations her worsening health created, like the day she had to get a handicap parking tag. “I’m an aerobics instructor; I don’t need a handicap parking tag,” Lynise recalls telling her doctor. “But he said, ‘Oh, but you do.’ It broke my heart to realize he was right.
“When I had to stand in line at the DMV and get that tag, I cried all day. When I got to the booth, the man said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and ironically, he knew who I was and said, ‘I have kidney disease, too.’ He told me that he got a kidney from his sister. He said, ‘You’ll get a transplant, Miss Weeks. It’ll be okay.’
“It was very hard to accept that my body was falling apart and I wasn’t the same person.”
When the call came in August 2003 that there was a pair of kidneys available for transplant, Lynise was overjoyed. But in her excitement, she failed to really listen to what her doctors said about the quality of those kidneys. They were in just fair condition – the reason she received both instead of one. JoEllen Kay, Lynise’s transplant coordinator at Froedtert Memorial Hospital where the surgery was performed, says most transplant patients go home after five to seven days. In the next four months, Lynise would spend just eight days out of the hospital. She shopped in Chicago on one of those days; on another, she went to WTMJ, where staffers recall hailing her as a returning hero. That day, WTMJ aired a spot done by Jacobs on Lynise’s transplant and her hopes for a new, healthier future.
The optimism didn’t last. The transplanted kidneys never worked right, says Kay, and by December, the medical team determined it was best to abandon the transplant.
Shortly after their removal, Lynise says she felt so much better, dropped pounds and pounds of water weight and was able to work when she felt well. But she was back on dialysis and at the bottom of the transplant list. “I couldn’t keep her away from work,” says Sievers. “There were many times she talked me into letting her work more. She would tell me that she would go to shoots where she would be throwing up.”
A bright spot during this time was the presence of her kindergarten-age niece, Jalynn, who, along with her mother Lynette, moved from Florida and in with Lynise for almost a year. Despite her poor health, Lynise was able to fit in a trip to Wisconsin Dells with Jalynn. “She is my gift from God,” says Lynise of her niece. “She’ll tell me, ‘You’re in my heart.’ We always end our conversations, ‘To the moon and back,’ meaning we love each other to the moon and back. I can deny that child nothing.”
Around the time her niece went back to Florida, Lynise received a phone call from media buddy Anne Catalane, who for many years was WISN–AM traffic reporter. Lyn-ise and Catalane hadn’t spoken in a few years, but that day, Catalane surprised her with some hopeful news. Spurred on by a “Today Show” about live organ donations, Catalane, unbeknownst to Lynise, went to Froedtert and had herself tested as a potential donor. It turned out Catalane and Lynise – both O-positive blood types – were a match. Coming just before Christmas, the news was the best present Lynise says she could have ever received. But the gift was premature. When Froedtert transplant officials found out that Catalane was 20 years older than Lynise, they nixed the surgery. Although organ donors can be in their 60s, because of the many complications Lynise had experienced and one failed transplant, Kay noted that Lynise needed a donor closer in age to herself in order to give her the optimum chance for success.
Since the beginning of this year, it’s been a roller-coaster for Lynise, with most of the time since March spent in the hospital, much of it in intensive care. First she was underdialysed. Then she developed hard, painful calcium deposits in her legs that required the removal of most of her parathyroid gland because it caused elevated calcium levels in her body. Next, she experienced an allergic reaction to the medication to break up those deposits. Plus, Sievers describes her perforated bowel as“an intra-abdominal catastrophe.” Nearly every time Lynise thought she would get out of the hospital, there would be a setback.
“Being sick and single is the pits,” says Weeks, whose extended family is geographically distanced.
Knowingly or not, Lynise prepared herself well for such a devastating illness. Number one, she worked for a large company that provided a comfortable health insurance safety net. Secondly, when she started at WTMJ, she signed up for disability income insurance. And despite her significant pre-existing health problems, the company last year allowed her to enroll in a long-term care insurance policy.
But beyond the financial aspects of dealing with this healthcare nightmare, Weeks developed what has clearly been her greatest strength: an incredibly devoted and seemingly indefatigable armada of friends who have ministered to her needs big and small. Lynise and her producer, Fox, were both regular Coca-Cola devotees. The onset of diabetes forced her to switch to Diet Coke, something Fox did in tandem. At one particularly low point, Jacobs spent days tracking down Lynise’s childhood idol, Chi Chi Williams, who surprised Lynise with a phone call. In April, while Lynise was in intensive care battling an infection, Sprangers and Baldwin moved Lynise’s things out of her apartment and into storage to await her move to assisted living. WTMJ has allowed her to keep her car in the company parking lot for months. And they’ve encouraged her to do the unpleasant but necessary things like drawing up a will. Observes Sievers: “What you see with a lot of patients is that when people get sick, friends leave. It’s been the opposite with her.”
Sprangers says the reason she hasn’t worn out her friends is her constant focus on the future and “everything but her disease.”
Adds Baldwin: “Her biggest ally is her attitude. You want to be around people with a good attitude.” Baldwin says that despite the many times Lynise talks about crying, Baldwin has rarely seen the tears. “Despite everything, she is still fun to be around. She always asks about me and my life. She is really selfless that way.”
On one of the visitsI made to Lynise’s hospital room, I found her sleeping with an aerobics video glowing away in the background and the Bible opened to the Book of Job beside her. Her faith, she says, has been important in helping her cope.
“I never say, ‘Why me?’ because why anybody? I do know that I feel that I am being punished severely for sins I never committed. I don’t necessarily think that I’ve cheated death. I think that God wants something from me and that is why he’s kept me around. There is something meant for me to do and I haven’t done it yet.”
Perhaps that reason was so she could finally tell her story. When I first contacted Lynise in late 2003, she was eager to speak with me as a way to promote the importance of organ donations. While she was still employed at WTMJ, company officials were reluctant to give her the okay to be interviewed. Only after she went on disability leave was she free to talk with me. By then, however, her health was on a downward spiral. It wasn’t the optimistic story of hope she or I had envisioned.
Helen Pauly is a frequent contributorto Milwaukee Magazine.
