TV anchor’s wife faces deadly diagnosis. Kansas City steps up with cascade of support
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‘So much inspiration’
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The hostile takeover of Chrissy Stewart’s body started around Labor Day. At first she felt bloated. Minor discomfort, nothing to call the doctor about.
But it got worse. Quickly. Something was growing inside her, and an at-home pregnancy test said it wasn’t another baby for this mother of three.
It was as big as a watermelon.
A tumor in her belly was pushing up against her ribs, bladder and other internal organs. The space around her lungs filled with fluid, like she was drowning inside.
Her stomach bloomed, big and round, and Stewart, a Children’s Mercy dietitian who is married to Fox 4 morning reporter and anchor Matt Stewart, indeed looked like she was with child.
Over the last few weeks, the Stewarts have learned that Chrissy has angiosarcoma, an unusual, aggressive cancer of the blood vessels that began in one of her ovaries, which makes her case rare.
Seeking hope from a second opinion, the Stewarts traveled to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston last month but returned with a bombshell that has shaken the people in their lives, including thousands of Matt’s fans.
There is less than a 5% chance that Chrissy will be alive 10 years from now. She is 43.
“All the things you would do to prevent cancer, I do those things,” Chrissy told The Star. “I don’t smoke. I work out. I get plenty of rest. I drink lots of water. I don’t overconsume alcohol. I’m a vegetarian.
“I mean, I’m at very, very low risk for getting cancer because of lifestyle things. So I’ve really chosen not to dwell on that, on why or where or how. It just happens, and I was one of the unlucky ones.”
The Stewarts are sharing their story on Facebook, where Matt has more than 17,000 followers. He sounded optimistic when he wrote on Oct. 4 that Chrissy was going into surgery to remove the mass from her ovary — “most signs point to it not being cancerous, however we won’t know for sure until they get it out and run some tests.”
One month later on Nov. 4, he wrote a “heartbroken” post with the news that “this cancer cannot be cured.”
“Only one in 100 million ever get this particular type. It’s so rare there is hardly any research on how to beat it,” Matt wrote.
The post elicited 8,000 reactions and more than 2,000 comments, including many supportive ones from Matt’s TV competitors around Kansas City, where he has been a newsman for nearly two decades.
Over the last few weeks, the Stewarts and their children have been flooded with good wishes, prayers and more meals than they could ever eat — priceless comfort in a time that has challenged them like no other in 19 years of marriage.
Some people have questioned them about talking publicly about a private health battle, even though it’s not the first time for Matt, who is 46.
In March, during National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, he revealed on air that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer a few months earlier. He said then and says today that Chrissy saved his life by encouraging him to have a colonoscopy, a recommended screening beginning at age 45.
He would do anything to return the favor now, if he could.
Practically speaking, letting people follow their journey on Facebook means they don’t have to keep repeating the story over and over.
“But the second thing is we have found so much inspiration from the community,” said Matt. “So many people have written in and said, ‘Hey, my mom, my dad, had an incurable cancer and they lived another 10, 20, 30 years and we’re praying for you and we’re thinking about you and this is how much you mean to us.’
“And the community has really lifted up our spirits throughout all of this. … I’m not looking for sympathy necessarily, but it’s been great to feed off their energy and support.”
Not sitting in a corner and crying
On a recent morning, Chrissy and Matt sat close to each other on a sofa in their Johnson County home as they talked about the last few weeks and what lies ahead. Chrissy confessed she was unsure about doing this interview. She’s not as comfortable in front of a camera as her TV anchor husband is.
A gold Emmy Award sat on a nearby bookshelf, rather inconspicuous among family photos and knickknacks. Matt Stewart won it in regional competition for reporting on historic flooding of Indian Creek in south Kansas City in the summer of 2017.
His wife is his ardent cheerleader. “He really cares about good journalism, and you’ll never meet anyone with more integrity, so I think he is really good at his job,” she said.
“I better see that quote in the article,” Matt joked. (Done.)
The Houston trip led to “a couple of days of heavy crying,” Matt said, but then they “decided that it was best to approach this from positivity, the best we could, and try to hopefully continue to live our lives and to enjoy each moment.”
“We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our kids, we owe it to our friends to not just sit in the corner and cry for however much time we have left together. We owe it to ourselves to try to make the most of every moment together from here on out.”
That reaction hasn’t surprised friends who have watched the Stewarts deal with other trauma with grace. Matt’s father, Thomas Scott Stewart, died of COVID-19 in Omaha two days after Christmas last year.
“She’s not backing away from the challenge,” said friend Katie Prater of Lenexa, whose sixth grade daughter, Quinn, has been in the Girl Scout troop Chrissy leads since kindergarten.
“The open, honest candor she is displaying with not only her kids but with all her friends and the people she holds dear I think is admirable.”
Prater noted how Chrissy didn’t give up carpool duties when she got sick. Chrissy is determined not to make big changes in the family’s daily life, especially for the kids. She has cancer, they don’t, she said.
Chrissy has what one longtime friend described as a “rich tapestry” of friends in her corner — work friends, other “boy moms” with teenage sons, the Girl Scout moms, church friends. On Nov. 2, nearly 30 of those friends “from all walks of life” stopped by the house to pray for them, Matt reported on Facebook.
As strong as they want to be for her, Chrissy’s close friends are emotionally wrecked.
Jill Tran, an interior designer who lives in Shawnee, met Matt 16 years ago and said she “invited them over to dinner because Matt wouldn’t quit talking about his wife, which was awesome and refreshing.”
She and Chrissy are now best friends.
“We’ve always planned on taking trips together in our lifetime when our kids were grown,” she said. “And I think to have that stolen — I feel like it’s stolen — is worse than any feeling.
“The whole thing just sucks. It’s awful. And you don’t realize how much you love someone until you get the whisper that they’re not going to be there like you thought they were.”
‘Hi, I’m Matt’
Both from Omaha, Chrissy and Matt have been inseparable from the moment they met more than 20 years ago in the lobby of the Iowa TV station where he worked.
Chrissy was a roommate of Matt’s sister, Natalie, in the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Matt had graduated and was working in Sioux City.
The weekend before Thanksgiving in 1999, Natalie and Chrissy drove four hours to Iowa to watch Matt in a community theater production of the Neil Simon play “Barefoot in the Park.” He had the lead role of the newlywed husband. But first, they went to see him at work.
“Hi, I’m Matt,” he said to Chrissy, bowled over by the pretty woman with long dark hair and big brown eyes standing in front of him.
“I remember the moment I shook his hand, to this day, I knew that he was something special. I really did,” Chrissy said.
He called her later that night and asked her out. Their first date was Thanksgiving Day, when Chrissy met the big group of Stewarts that would become her family, too.
When they decided they didn’t want to live four hours apart, Matt took a demotion to work at the ABC affiliate in Kearney. Then he took another demotion to follow Chrissy to Ohio, where she finished her master’s degree and internship work.
Chrissy then told Matt she would move wherever he wanted to live. For as long as they’ve known each other, they have promised: “I would go to the moon with you.”
“But they don’t have TV stations on the moon,” said Matt. “So we came to Kansas City.”
Careers in Kansas City
In August 2004, Matt took a job at KCTV-5, where he worked for eight years before moving to Fox 4, where he’s been the last nine years.
Chrissy began her career at Children’s Mercy and still works there.
“Ironically, I work with cancer patients,” said Chrissy, who as a clinical nutrition specialist helps children stay healthy and strong as they undergo chemotherapy.
Jamie Wilkins was one of the first people Chrissy befriended there. They’re both dietitians and had their first children around the same time.
“Chrissy’s a helper,” said Wilkins. “When we tell small children to have hope in the world and look for the helpers, we’re talking about people like her. She’s incredibly resilient. And she’s one of the most intuitively perceptive people in the room.
“Chrissy’s also a realist to her core. So there’s not a doubt what’s happening to her right now, she’s very realistic about it. But she’s not a morose, pessimistic type of a realist. She’s a positive person who can see benefit in spending her time in beneficial ways for her and the people around her.”
Stewarts, strong
When they got home from MD Anderson, the Stewarts held a family meeting to tell the kids what the doctors said.
Chrissy and Matt are trying not to keep anything about her illness from their children: Jackson, 16; Alex, 14; and 11-year-old Maddy.
They resisted the urge to keep some things from young Maddy because “it would be better to just let us, all of us, be on the same page,” said Chrissy. “This is a horrible ship we’re in, but let’s all get in this together and support each other.”
They’ve let the kids know they can ask any question and feel any way they need to feel about what’s happening. One is a little more angry than the others, while another is acting like nothing unusual is happening. All of them are giving out extra hugs at night.
“We’re going to deal with this as a family and, if anything, show (them) that bad things do happen in your life and this is how families respond in a healthy way,” she said. “So yes, there are tears, yes, there are questions. Yes, there are inappropriate comments and jokes.
“But it’s all valid. It’s all OK. They’re processing and we’re processing, and we’re all at different places and all of that is OK. It’s all welcome here.”
Tran said her friend offers “no empty optimism” to her children. “She is incredibly open with her kids about it. It’s very real, and I admire her greatly for that.”
At a recent event Chrissy attended with her daughter, a woman talked about her experiences with domestic violence. Chrissy was “a little uncomfortable” since Maddy is only 11.
But then she thought, “When else am I going to be able to talk about this? This is something a mom needs to talk to her daughter about. So we had this really great conversation all the way home about domestic violence, just all the things I would want to tell her that I normally, probably would have just waited (to talk about).
“I want her to have my voice inside of her. You know, if and when any of these things were to occur to her or someone that she loves. I want her to have her mama in there, like, ‘my mom would say …’”
“She will,” said Matt.
“And, too,” said Chrissy, “I think of my children and it really does take a village, as they say. And I want to surround them with positive, empowering mentors in their lives, other women who can be like their second mamas, now and later, because I won’t be here. I think that’s really important to me, too.”
Oh, the hair
Chrissy has had long hair her entire life. And when that moment came, as it does for most chemo patients, when she was told that her hair would likely fall out or thin dramatically, she laughed.
“So my joke with the nurse — you make silly jokes when you have cancer, it’s totally appropriate — was that if I keep it long and it falls out, I’m going to look like Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings.’”
She thought it was funny to compare herself to the stringy-haired, big-eared Middle-earth creature.
Matt didn’t think it was funny.
Every chemo patient she consulted, plus her oncologist, told her that most people first cut their hair short “because big gobs of long hair falling out would be a little more traumatic, and it’s messy,” Chrissy said.
She took a poll on her Facebook page: How should I get my hair cut?
In the end, the choice fell to Maddy, who decided her mom needed the short ‘do that Kaley Cuoco from “The Big Bang Theory” has worn.
One of Chrissy’s best friends does her hair. So on Nov. 18, Chrissy and a handful of her closest gal pals gathered at the friend’s house and watched Chrissy go short. They had champagne.
“I knew that it would be kind of an emotional thing,” said Chrissy. “It’s hair … in the long scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. But as a woman, it’s just like one more thing cancer is taking from me.
“But I am just determined to squeeze every amount of fun and joy out of this horrible situation, so I decided we were going to make it fun.”
But she didn’t love the short hair.
‘All the minutes’
There’s a cooler on the Stewarts’ front porch where people are leaving food for them. Chrissy has not cooked a meal since her surgery in early October.
“Oh, my gosh, our meal train goes all the way to the beginning of April,” said Matt. “We had to stop it. So many people signed up to bring a meal, every other day for the next six months. It’s like crazy.”
Chrissy’s dietitian friends have delivered some of their favorite meals. “We’ve learned really fast that if it’s a dietitian meal, it’s going to be delicious,” she said.
Wilkins said Chrissy’s “nerdy dietitian” friends are happy to pitch in. Like other friends, they’re trying to help Chrissy maintain normalcy, even when they all want to spend as much time as they can with her.
“Regret is one of the worst emotions I’ve ever felt in my life, and I think none of us wants to have any regrets,” said Wilkins.
“So … I am very quick to say, ‘Girl, I love you. Look in my eyeballs and see me say I love you.’ Because there’s no time like right now, and we want time with her while she’s feeling good, but we also know that’s selfish.
“And she deserves time to just feel normal and not feel like the center of this poor cancer girl spotlight that she didn’t ask for.”
Her friends know that those weekly chemo sessions have been rough, and they feel helpless.
“All you want to do is take the pain away. And there’s nothing that does it. So all you can do is just be there and be like, ‘this sucks. I’m so sorry,’” said Prater.
She wishes she could tell Chrissy: “I’ll spend the weekend throwing up for you and then you can have your body back.”
Chrissy took back control of one part of her body last week when the hair in her new short hairdo started falling off her head in clumps.
So Maddy shaved her mom’s head.
Because, really, who has time now to clean shower drains clogged with hair?
She announced that she’s gone bald on her Facebook page, where she posted a photo of herself wearing a Santa hat. More than 600 people responded — lots of hearts and thumbs up.
Two months ago, Chrissy said, it would not have been unreasonable for her, at age 43, to expect another 30 years of life.
“If you have 30 years to live your life, what are you gonna do with your 30 years? You have plenty of time,” she said.
But “when you have three, you have to smash it all in. So if I go, I want all the minutes.”
How to help the Stewarts
▪ Friends of Chrissy and Matt Stewart are raising money to help with long-term housekeeping services and other everyday burdens to let Chrissy focus on the long road of treatment ahead. T-shirts for $20 to $30 with the #StewartStrong logo are being sold to raise money. The link — stewartstrong2.itemorder.com — is on the StewartStrongKC Facebook page.
▪ A GoFund Me page — StewartStrong Supports Chrissy — has also been set up to raise $7,000 to help with medical and household expenses as Chrissy faces future surgeries, immunotherapy treatment and travel to consult with specialists.
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "TV anchor’s wife faces deadly diagnosis. Kansas City steps up with cascade of support."
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