Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 23, 1992 TAG: 9203230138
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Planning his wife's funeral wasn't one of them.
I talked to Frank on Friday after hearing him on a call-in show on WFIR radio. He had called in to pose a question to the show's guests, two officials from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Virginia.
He didn't give his name when he called the show, but there was no mistaking Frank's Long Island accent. His was a voice I knew well, from doing dozens of interviews with him about his wife, Lorraine, and her fight against cancer, and their battle against Blue Cross to cover her treatment.
In January, I even wrote a story about Frank himself, and his efforts to become a one-man lobbying machine against Blue Cross and big insurance to ensure that other women won't have to go through similar insurance woes.
So, when I heard Frank's voice on the radio, I knew that he was about to turn the screws on the Blue Cross boys.
Good old relentless Frank, I thought.
Who would have known that the very next day Lorraine would lie dying in Roanoke Memorial Hospital, a victim of the equally relentless cancer that she and Frank thought had been licked.
But the Blue Cross guys moved on to the next caller before Frank got up a full head of steam. Too bad. He might have made the show more lively. Having spent 16 hours shadowing Frank on his first lobbying trip to Richmond I knew well how he could have stirred things up.
As it was, most of the callers called to say how wonderful they thought it was that Blue Cross was expanding its Roanoke operation and bringing in 160 new jobs.
I called Frank up myself.
It had been a week or so since we last talked, when I ran into him in Fincastle where he lives and works as the buildings and grounds supervisor for Botetourt County.
On that day in Fincastle, he was celebrating his 35th birthday and feeling good. He joked about the front-page story I had written about him. He said he had been enduring a lot of good-natured ribbing about his celebrity status since.
A co-worker earlier in the day had even jabbed that the Roanoke Times & World-News should have sent a photographer to shoot pictures of the little birthday party the county staff had surprised him with, he said.
The notoriety aside, what Frank was really happy about was Lorraine. She was alive and well, other than what they thought was a typical bout with the flu.
The main thing was that she was alive.
A year before, things hadn't been so promising.
A year before, Lorraine had been preparing to undergo a rigorous chemotherapy regimen and bone-marrow transplant that was her last hope at beating breast cancer.
It was a treatment Blue Cross refused to cover, saying it was still experimental. About 10 percent of the women who have the treatment die from radiation poisoning before it's done.
Lorraine, however, was willing to take her chances.
I wrote a story, several stories actually, about how she needed this treatment, but didn't have the money. And about why Blue Cross wouldn't cover her. Other members of the news media also ran stories.
Not surprisingly, donations poured in, $130,000 worth.
Enough to cover most of the $180,000 procedure, which Lorraine underwent last April and had been recovering from - successfully, her doctors had thought - since.
Friday, when I called Frank, I asked about Lorraine, as I always do when we talk. Here, I am not alone. Anybody who knows Frank always asks about Lorraine.
They won't anymore.
Frank said Lorraine was fine Friday. She still had the flu, but otherwise she was fine. He was as upbeat as he had been the week before, and when we went to Richmond together in January.
And as usual, he was plotting strategy.
First, he told me he was scheduled to be the guest on Wednesday on the same WFIR call-in show I had heard him on that morning. (Sunday night, Frank said he still plans to appear on the show, which airs Wednesday at 9 a.m.)
Second, he said he was planning some more trips to Richmond to lobby the governor's commission on insurance and health care.
Frank wants the commission to require all insurance companies to cover bone-marrow transplants for breast cancer patients.
Lastly, he said he was organizing a grass-roots association that would advocate the rights of the consumer in insurance and health-care issues. Just from the publicity of the story back in January, Frank said he was getting several telephone calls each week from people with health-care horror stories of their own.
"I'm not going to let this die," he vowed to me.
Two moments come to mind that I will never forget. One was in January, when Frank was introduced to the full Virginia Senate, the pride in his face beaming as he stood and waved from the balcony above.
The other was when I visited Lorraine shortly after she arrived home from her bone-marrow transplant last spring. She was weak, but hopeful as her sons, Brian and Kevin, bounced on her knee, hugged her and played with toys around her feet.
What I saw there was a woman savoring moments with her children that she never knew for sure she would have.
Nothing was being taken for granted.
How many of us can say the same?
by CNB