NY Anchor Beats Cancer

NY1 Anchor Ruschell Boone managed to beat pancreatic cancer, which has a perilously low survival rate.

It has been a very tough year for the longtime Anchor.

In November 2021, she lost her mother to COVID-19. This past April, her stepsister succumbed to multiple myeloma.

But, her work life was going well. After two decades at the station, Boone was given her own show.

Then she started feeling a bit off. “There was something off about it. I just felt weird,” she said, adding that she had been slowly losing weight.

On June 14, she woke up in the middle of the night with horrible stomach pain, her heart racing. She asked her husband, Todd, to take her to the emergency room, where a CT scan revealed devastating news: Boone had pancreatic cancer.

“I just started wailing, crying and looking at my husband, thinking I heard it incorrectly,” she told the NY Post “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m dead’ … My kids [Jackson, 11 and Carter, 9] are going to grow up without a mother.”

The Post writes, Pancreatic cancer, which took the lives of Alex Trebek and Patrick Swayze, is an especially deadly form of cancer. Five-year survival rates are lower than 10%, according to the National Cancer Institute. It typically only becomes symptomatic after it’s spread to other organs, at which point it can be treated with very limited success.

Boone started chemo in July, and, though it wreaked havoc on her body, she did her best to retain a level of normalcy at home, displaying her trademark cheeriness to keep her sons’ fears at bay.

“In my off weeks, I made it a point to do a lot with them. When I had chemo, I still came home and I cooked and cleaned. And I was always upbeat, which helped a lot and is disarming, especially with children,” said Boone.

Then, she received some good news: She was eligible for a Whipple procedure — an invasive surgery during which doctors remove the head of the pancreas, the first part of the small intestine, the gallbladder and the bile duct. They then reconnect the remaining organs so patients can digest food normally.

“The day the surgeon told me, I jumped out of bed. I was like, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ As far as we know, this the only lifesaving method, so this [news] was overwhelming. There was a sense of, ‘I’m going to live.'”

About four weeks ago, she had the Whipple surgery. She’s still recovering, but her outlook is quite positive.

“This was the turning point. All my tests confirmed that [the doctors] got all the cancer and there was no spread to the lymph nodes,” she said, adding that she will undergo another round of chemo and then be monitored with scans.

Boone knows she was lucky, partly because she was so proactive in seeking answers, which led to early detection.

“Another year, another six months, this could be a very different story. I’m glad my story was one of hope and survival. As my brothers said, ‘We were due for a win.'”