Two Stage-Four Cancers Hit One Father and Daughter Around the Same Time

For a month, William Shatner massaged the lump in his neck, just as the first doctor had told him to do. It kept getting bigger.

Convinced it was a blocked salivary gland, he finally went to another doctor. Within two or three days he was in surgery, and the lump proved to be stage-four melanoma.

That diagnosis is only half the story, and not the part that changed his family. At about the same time, his youngest daughter, Melanie, was found to have a separate stage-four cancer, breast cancer, and his calm response to her terror brought them closer than he thought possible.

His own doctor told him how narrow his escape had been. Five years earlier, before a new treatment had been invented, Shatner said, there would have been no cure and the melanoma would have killed him in months. He said that for two years, he was infused.

Melanie's cancer was discovered almost by chance. During a breast cancer check, the woman waving the imaging wand told her she was fine, but as she was leaving, an inner voice told her to ask for another look.

She went back and asked the nurse to check one spot again. Under her breath, Melanie heard the nurse admit, "I would have missed that."

Shatner describes his own reaction as matter of fact, a confidence that the doctors would handle it. Melanie, a young mother, was overwhelmed by a thought she had never faced, that she might die.

Her terror, he said, lent itself to "daddy, I need you." And, he said, "daddy says, 'I'm here.'"

That closeness had deep roots. After his divorce, when his daughters were very young, he had them every weekend for schoolwork, sleepovers, and planned adventures to the beach and elsewhere.

At the time, he lived on a mattress while paying to keep them in their home. When he drove away on Sunday nights, he cried at leaving them, and Melanie later told him, "Every time you left us, I thought you'd turn around and come back." He told her he had thought the same thing.

So when cancer came for them both, he put his arms around her in the way he had once wanted to do on that balcony. "It's going to be all right, honey. You're going to be fine," he told her. At the time of the interview, she was fine, he said, and the ordeal had brought a family that was already close even closer.