This is press pass, your all access pass to an extra meet the press conversation. This week on press pass, tom brokaw on his diagnosis of multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable blood cancer. What it taught him about doctors, drugs and his own mortality. Hes written about it all in a new book called a lucky life interrupted and joins me now. Tom, welcome. Thank you. You know, you dish feel i feel look i lived you writing this book. You told me your motivation for writing this book more than anything it seemed was you were stunned at how hard it was to toto navigate the American Health care system. Thats right. What i wanted this is not about poor tommy has cancer. It is about what i went through with all the resources i had. You had more resources. I was on the board of mayo clinic. I could pick up the phone and get whoever i wanted to. What i learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case. I happened to have in my family an extraordinarily gifted Emergency Room Physician in jennifer brokaw. She became my consigliere. She was on the side looking in asking the right questions, telling me there was somebody else we should be talking to. I suggested, see if you can find a doctor who can just be the interpreter, the ombudsman for you and dont forget to ask questions when youre dealing with specialists. However gifted they may be. They welcome it. And be honest about your own condition. My team kept saying, you understated your pain. I have a high tolerance for pain. I said pain is three on the scale of ten. I had four fractures in my spine at that point. They said, we needed to know that. There are lots of dimensions to being a cancer patient. The overwhelming one is it takes over your life. And that thats what you kept saying about i want to go back to the fact you had jennifer to sort of manage this. How would you recommend to somebody who gets this cancer diagnosis, and they dont have your resources, how do you do it . How do you find that doctor . You can do it by going online now, by the way. You have to be careful you dont read everything. You have to the source you can trust and you can be candid with your own physician and your own Health Care System wherever you live in this country. But you can go online to the mayo clinic for example, or the clevelanddana farber or sloanketterings and canvass where you live the medical community and say who knows something about this who can help me out with this i need a friend quite honestly. It is easy for me to say because i had those resources, but i found a number of people and there is networking that goes on i got multiple myeloma, i heard from everyone in america who had multiple myeloma, thats not unusual. Thats a good thing. We didnt have that. 15 years ago you wouldnt have had that. 15 years ago i probably would have died. There is multiple Myeloma Research foundation kathie gusty, who knows more about this because shes a survivor of it. You can go online there and find out what is happening. But the big bottom line is take charge of your case. Be involved. And dont try not to the little whiney reserve it for the big stuff. What do you mean by that the whineyness . What i mean by the whineyness if you go in and say, i heard from somebody today and youre not doing that, some physicians are quite arrogant they think they have the answers and you have to call them on that. I had one bad experience with a physician involved in my team and i walked away from him. And i let everybody know why i was doing it. I went to someone else and it was a good thing i did. What was the most surprising thing about dealing with the various doctors you had to deal with . What was the part that sort of shock you the most . Two aspects, i think. One was, it was a lot more debilitating than i expected it to be. When they diagnosed me the doctor who looked at my blood count and said you have a malignancy it is called multiple myeloma. We know people who died from this. He said the next thing he said was that were making a lot of progress it is going to be okay. They did not say to me well look because it is a bone disease as well it is going to be painful. And you got to get ready for that in some passion. I wish i had known more about what was coming. The other big, big piece of it is when you get cancer it doesnt go away. You live with it every day. It becomes a kind of scrim in your life. You see the whole world through the filter of cancer. Youve known me for a long time. Im reasonably a hardened guy. Ive done a lot of things in my life. But nothing so took over my life like cancer did. And thank god i had a terrific family not just jennifer but my other daughters and meredith especially who were there for me. And were apathetic, but also stood in front and said youre not going to do that. You have to stay home and were going to have to work on this. Trust me people like me were like come on tom, i need you to do this. No. Meredith said no. Quick break. More from tom brokaw and how he fought cancer and hes beating it in a moment. Back now with more from tom brokaw and his new book a lucky life interrupted. You began by saying hey, this is you didnt this book isnt about you. And you want to make that clear. This book is about to some degree it is about me, my experience. I try to make those experiences, however, helpful to other people. And thats a big thing. One of the best lines came from my friend Sam Donaldson who had a Cancer Experience himself. And i could hear his voice on the letter you know thomas i know when youre thinking youre thinking why me . The better question is at our age, why not me . And just because were on television doesnt mean were immune to what happens to people. And as you grow older, evolution kicks in and you got all these cells running through your body and sooner or later one of them will go rogue and thats the essence of cancer. Where are we on this president nixon declared a war against cancer. There are others that say, you know what it is natural, were all if you live long enough youll get cancer. Yeah. What do we know yet . There is so much i feel like we dont know. The big breakthrough is about to be even larger it appears. That is mono cloneal gene therapy, they reengineer genes and reinsert them in your body. This is adult stem cells . Is this where that comes in . Thats something else. They take blood from you and reinsert it in you. This is where theyre going out and specifically engineering a cell to attack cancer. And everyone you talk to whatever their view of how to treat cancer this is the next big breakthrough. Here is a perfect example. Very dramatic one. At the mayo clinic they had a patient who had three relapses of multiple myeloma. Just wasnt going to survive. And they said we got a hail mary but dont know whether it is going to work or not, are you willing to try it . She said what choice do i have . Of course ill try it. They gave her 10,000 times the regular dose of a measles vaccine. It was a traumatic she went into hallucinations and had tremors and temperature rose. 24 hours late the cancer was gone. And it has been gone for three years. It was stunning. Now, they did another patient and it didnt work as well. But it is that kind of thing thats the most dramatic example. It is that kind of thing of finding new ways to attack cancer using your own body to do that. Best line i know about cancer however, came from one of the oncologists who was in that broadcast that ken burns did, where an oncologist said cancer doesnt care if youre a mother father or where you are in life. It only cares about declaring a war on your body and you have to be able to attack cancer in that way. Did it change your outlook on life . I assume it does. But you dont know until you have it. You hear about this from other people. Yeah. One of the last lines of the book is am i a better person. That will be for others to judge. I had a lot of momentum. Ive been doing what ive been doing im 75. Ive been doing it since i was 19 or 20. I wont break away from the fundamentals of my life. One of my friends did ask the most pertinent question halfway through the treatment and said how is your tolerance for jerks . Used a more colorful term. I said, zip at this point. I deal with people i really want to deal with and who about. And the folks in the margin are the demands or the requests on the margin i have no no problem with saying no im not going to do that. There is a song that goes through my head tim mcgraw, son of tug mcgraw, this song he dedicates to his dad. He talks about it all just you just everything is a little more precious. Is it . It is actually. It is quite unlike anything else that i have ever experienced. And i, you know i would get up in the morning and i would look in the mirror and i would be shaving and say, i got cancer. It just didnt go away. Or i would wake up in the middle of the night and for a nanosecond i would think i dont have cancer but i do have cancer. How do you avoid the depression . How did you do it . Well i did on my case because im on the an essential optimist. Remember that Ronald Reagan line about the child who comes down in the morning and beneath the Christmas Tree there is an enormous pile of horse he says there has to be a pony in here somewhere. Thats my attitude about life. Thats very helpful. My whole attitude is very very important and having the right kind of team around you. And not just people constantly wringing their hands. If you have a friend who has cancer dont pick up the phone every day and say how are you doing . Wait a while, say, can i come over and get the kids have you heard this piece of gossip. Be normal. Be normal. Go watch a game. Cancer patients should have caring bridges and those sights you can do which everyone gets an update at the same time. You say, youre not done yet. You have Unfinished Business here at nbc. What is that . Well im not done yet. Here i am on meet the press. Thats right. I never think youre done. Im always going to have you here. Im not done yet. Im going to have to temper my travel a little more. And im at a stage in my life when i want to do that anyway i want to concentrate on things i want to you know i want to write more i do enjoy writing and i want to consolidate the Television Part of my life so i can spend more time writing. Im very excited about the election cycle coming up. We share the junkie gene. I want to be involved in that. I may not be as fully immersed as i have been in the past. After that ive got grandchildren and theyre fantastic as all grandparents say about their grandchildren and i love any amount of timehave with them because i just like watching their development and their evolution and i like the relationship. They call me tom. And theyve seen me on television. I said to i got the two little we call them the hool ganz hooligans, they live on west side of new york i describe to them the definition of decibels. And the next week they came back and one came in to me and said very solemnly tom, well keep the decibels down this weekend. I said thats a deal. They learned. Well a lucky life interrupted, but it has been a brief interruption. It is good to have you here. You look great. You seem it doesn