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The Race of Her Life: When DonnaLyn Giegerich found out she had a rare form of cancer, she refused to let it beat her
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/11/08

By Shannon Mullen
Staff Writer

True story: While fighting a deadly form of cancer, DonnaLyn Giegerich, wearing a wig because she was bald from her treatments, ran a 5-kilometer road race in Rumson with chemotherapy drugs coursing into her body through a port in her arm.

"I just woke up that morning and said to my husband, "I feel good, let's do it,' " said Giegerich, 45, of Middletown. "I finished in the back of the pack, but as far as I was concerned, I was showing up, and that's what was important to me."

Another true story: Just a few months after completing her cancer treatments, she ran a half-marathon in Florida, a little more than 13 miles.

"It was amazing," she said. "I felt great the whole race. A lot of times, I'm just so physically exhausted at the end of a competition that I just want to sit down, relax and kick my feet up. But when I finished that half-marathon, I felt like I could have gone for another half-marathon, because I was so happy to be alive."

"That's DonnaLyn," said her friend and training partner, Marianne Reagan, 53, of Eatontown. "If she has to walk, suck it up, vomit on the side of the road — whatever — she'll finish what she starts."

Giegerich's grit will be on display again Sunday at the MetroMan Triathlon in Asbury Park. She's competing in the shorter of two events that morning, the sprint triathlon, which consists of a 500-meter ocean swim, a 15-kilometer bike race and a 5-kilometer run.

Proceeds from the MetroMan event will benefit the DonnaLyn Giegerich Leiomyosarcoma Research Fund, a foundation one of her friends established in her honor to help find a cure for a rare disease that's every bit as tough to beat as DonnaLyn herself.

A Middletown native, Giegerich (pronounced GEEG-rick) has always been a hard-charger — "type A plus-plus," said her husband of 17 years, Tom Zapcic, 45. A cheerleader at Red Bank Catholic High School, she ran track in college, did a sales stint with IBM, then went to Wall Street for a few years, working as a credit analyst in a highly competitive, male-dominated environment.

In 1989, she switched careers, starting an insurance agency with Zapcic in Red Bank. They got married a couple of years later. Giegerich says her father gave her $10,000 for a big wedding reception, but she opted for a modest party instead and used the bulk of the money to buy the first of several residential rental properties she and Zapcic now own.

A certified personal trainer and yoga teacher, Giegerich completed her first marathon when she was 40. In the summer of 2006, at the Sandy Hook Sprint Triathlon, she finished first in her age group, and fifth among women overall. At her age, she says, "it feels good to smoke 30-year-olds to the finish line."

She was in peak physical condition, or so she thought. Coming home from a yoga teaching trip to Jamaica, she felt stabs of pain on her right side, extending toward her back. She thought it was a kidney stone or ruptured appendix, but tests at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank revealed a baseball-sized tumor wedged between her kidneys and adrenal glands, pressed against a key vein. Because of the "anatomically challenging" location of the tumor, she wound up at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City where a team lead by Dr. E. Darracott Vaughan Jr. carefully removed the mass in a seven-hour surgery.

Giegerich was already exercising again when, several weeks later, the pathology report came back: She had leiomyosarcoma, or LMS, an incurable, highly recurrent soft-tissue cancer that strikes four out of 1 million people.

"I know for sure now that my doctors really didn't want to tell me all those gory details immediately after my surgery because they knew they had a very positively thinking patient with a good attitude and a strong body and mind, and I think they wanted me to harness that to continue my path to wellness," she said.

LMS is so rare that there's no consensus on how best to treat it. In part because she was so fit and strong, her doctors chose an aggressive course consisting of radiation treatments, chemotherapy and a robotic radiosurgery treatment known as CyberKnife.

At the onset, Giegerich threw a Cancer Cocktail Party for more than 40 of her closest female friends at Nauvoo Grill in Fair Haven. She wanted them to know exactly what she was up against, and to ask them to stand by her.

"She was so focused on the finish line, the end result — to do what she needed to do, then educate as many people as possible," said her friend Jeanie Coomber, 39, of Ocean Grove, who established the research fund once she learned about how little attention is paid to sarcoma cancers like LMS, compared with other forms of cancer.

"She lived what she preached," Coomber said. "She exercised throughout, she was very health-oriented, she ate right, she smiled a lot — even though we knew she was physically very sick. She made everybody around her feel good. She'd get mad if you felt sorry for her."

The final two weeks of Giegerich's chemotherapy treatments were so debilitating, Zapcic feared his wife might not survive. In the end, she called a halt to the treatments two months short of their scheduled conclusion. Her health gradually improved, and before long she was biking, swimming and running again, determined to move forward any way she could.

Today, cancer-free for the past year and a half, she talks about her ordeal like the three parts of a triathlon. There was "the cancer piece," the recovery piece and now the "paying it forward" piece. The latter refers to her commitment to raise awareness about LMS and encourage others facing daunting challenges in their lives.

Long before her illness, she and her husband were active in numerous charitable causes, including the Rotary Club, the American Cancer Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They've helped raise money to build an orphanage in Haiti. In 2005, Giegerich won the Fresh Air Fund's Chairperson of the Year Award after she increased the number of host families in Monmouth County from 5 to 80 in a single year.

Since her illness, Giegerich, who is back to work selling insurance, has been teaching women affected by cancer about yoga and staying fit for a cancer support organization called Team Survivor Tri-State. She's established a scholarship through the Eastern Monmouth Area Chamber of Commerce to help women entrepreneurs advance their careers.

And she's started yet another career as a motivational speaker. In May, she gave the keynote address at a statewide cancer conference at Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick.

"She's very, very dynamic," said Coomber, who has heard Giegerich speak in public. "She can tell a story with power, efficiency and speed better than anybody I've ever seen. . . . You just feel empowered."

Some people set annual goals. Giegerich sets quarterly ones. She's been doing that for years, but now it serves a practical purpose because she has checkups every three months to stay on top of her cancer, which could return at any time.

After learning that her latest scans were clear, she promptly registered for her next big athletic challenge: the Delaware Diamondman Half Ironman on Sept. 7 in Bear, Del. It's a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike ride and a 13.1-mile run. After that, she's set her sights on climbing Mount Fuji or Mount Kilimanjaro.

"I am very fortunate," she said. "My husband and I have lived a very rich, experiential life. We've traveled, we've had amazingly beautiful relationships in our life. We've built businesses, we've served our community, we've made great memories.

"So I feel that, in a way, if my life is going to be cut short, I can be very peaceful about it because we have lived our life with no regrets," she said. "The way I see it, and I know my husband concurs, everything from here on in is gravy."

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