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Film Shows Lives Changed: Director Chronicles How Testing Positive for Cancer Gene Affects Women

Posted on: Sunday, 22 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Carol Biliczky, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

Jan. 22--Linda Pedraza knew the forecast was dark. Cancer had followed her family for generations.

So it was no surprise when she tested positive for the cancer gene BRCA1.

Two bouts of cancer and three years later, she was dead at 45.

The Copley Township native is among the people with altered BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes who will be featured in an hourlong documentary by Kartemquin Films, the Chicago company that made the 1993 film Hoop Dreams and the TV series The New Americans.

Filmmaker Joanna Rudnick launched In the Family when she tested positive for the altered BRCA1 gene four years ago at age 27.

She realized she was in an elite club. The test has only been available since the early 1990s, so today's generation is the first to have the option of possibly foreseeing their future.

As many as 85 percent of women with one or both of the genes get breast cancer; as many as 60 percent, ovarian cancer.

"It will be about how women like myself deal with this life-changing knowledge," Rudnick said.

Since the genes deal a multigenerational blow, she also filmed other members of Pedraza's family -- her sister, Lisa Carden of Stow, and brother, Gary Varvaro of Tallmadge, both of whom have the altered BRCA1 gene, too.

For Carden, 41, that's meant breast cancer. The disease metastasized to -- or invaded -- her lung two years ago.

Varvaro, 47, had bladder cancer at age 19. Doctors say the BRCA1 gene isn't an indicator of that cancer, but Carden is convinced that his brush with the disease was no coincidence.

In fact, cancer's toll on the family extends back at least three generations.

The mother of Pedraza, Varvaro and Carden died of ovarian cancer at 43. Their mother's sister died of ovarian cancer. Their mother's mother died of a cancer. Although it wasn't diagnosed as such, Carden believes it was ovarian.

With a legacy like that, Linda Pedraza originally wanted to keep the disease at bay by having her breasts and uterus surgically removed.

When she met her future husband, Luis, at a party at the University of Cincinnati, she acquainted him early on with her plan.

But life got in the way.

After they graduated, they married and moved to Boston to be near the ocean. Two children, Joey, now 19, and Nicole, 16, followed.

He was an industrial designer; she, a medical technologist who later managed information systems for a health-care company.

While she was monitored for cancer throughout her life, she never followed through on her plan.

"I tried to encourage her without pressuring her," Luis Pedraza said. "I said, `Why wait?' But unfortunately there was already an excuse."

Too late to save her

When ovarian cancer surfaced in March 2003, Pedraza finally had the hysterectomy she'd avoided for so long. In so doing she beat the cancer. Galvanized, she set a date for the preventative mastectomies.

But just six weeks before her surgery, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer that already had invaded 13 of 15 lymph nodes.

The future had turned from hopeful to "pretty dire," her husband said. While chemotherapy did "an amazing job," she began experiencing terrific headaches. That turned out to be cancer in her brain and spinal cord.

She died less than six months later on Jan. 6.

It was a fate she had come to accept, Luis Pedraza said.

"That's one of the most remarkable things about my wife -- how she managed to convert this unmanageable, scary, stressful situation into a nurturing one and getting the whole family to accept this as a natural outcome of life," he said. "We learned how to deal with dying because of her."

In addition to her husband, children and siblings, Pedraza also leaves her father and stepmother, Joe and Julie Varvaro of Copley Township.

Rudnick will present a demonstration reel of In the Family at Joining Forces Against Breast Cancer, the first conference on hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, on Feb. 10 and 11 in Tampa.

The full documentary could be out in a year to 18 months, Rudnick said.

Carol Biliczky can be reached at 330-996-3729 or cbiliczky@thebeaconjournal.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

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Source: Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio)

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