Skip to main content

Larissa Gionfriddo Podermanski: Always Hope and Never Forgotten


When my daughter Larissa was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), her world could have come to an end.

She was thirty years old. She had just launched a nonprofit, Community Navigators. It was located in Connecticut, and its purpose was to provide services and support to individuals with disabilities who were defining – and working to achieve – their own futures.

She had recently bought a house and gotten engaged. She and Martin were planning a wedding. She was thinking about starting a family soon.

And then in the blink of an eye everything changed. The lump she found in her breast proved to be cancerous.  Before she could even begin treatment, the cancer had spread to her liver and her bones.

Given the dire prognosis, I imagine that most people would crawl into a hole, disappear from view, and take what comfort they could from their remaining days.

That was not Larissa’s style.

She decided to get married immediately, and six days later she and Martin were married in a beautiful, if hastily planned, ceremony. She invested time in her nonprofit, working to build it and grow its reputation. She gardened. She traveled. She built memories. And she hoped.

More importantly, Larissa decided to share her story, and became a tireless advocate for women and men living with MBC. She started a blog she called Metastatically Speaking, through which she reported on her MBC journey. She connected with the Pink Agenda and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, tirelessly raising money and awareness for both organizations and for metastatic breast cancer research.

She created a bucket list, which included both travel and getting to meet her singing idol, Mariah Carey. She made it to Florida several times, and to Poland and Barbados, and she not only met Mariah, she grew to call her a friend.

Larissa understood that her condition was serious when she set living to forty as her goal and accepted that her dogs Bella, Dom, and Mandy would have to substitute for a human family.  What she never accepted was that she couldn’t have hope for a brighter future.

Her cancer steadily progressed, and I grew to dread each three month update. Although she got the best of care, it wasn’t always great care. One health care provider lost her tumor records. She had to switch insurers twice in two years – the first because her insurer wouldn’t cover the specialty treatment she needed in network, and the second because after Congress and the President did their work to undermine the Affordable Care Act in 2017, her premium skyrocketed. That’s just a fact.

Last October, Larissa was featured on Megyn Kelly Today, telling her story with grace, humor, and assertiveness. She said that she knew she would die from her cancer, and that she was okay with that. 

What she wasn’t okay with was a system that offered so little to people with serious chronic conditions in general. And after she met Lady Gaga late last year, she said “Dad, you have to work with her foundation – she’s really concerned about mental health, like you.”

Larissa had a knack for connecting dots like this. She figured out what wasn’t working for her and for people with other serious chronic conditions, and tried to fix it. She learned how to fight for the care she and others needed but often didn’t get because of inadequate public and private insurance. She wondered why we made it so hard.

During her two years of living and thriving with metastatic breast cancer, Larissa found a public voice that I’m not sure even she realized she had until then. She used that voice to advocate, educate, and inform, and to help countless other people with all chronic conditions.

I would tell people I knew that if they ever felt they were losing hope, or struggling to find their own purpose in life, they should watch Larissa’s ten minute Megyn Kelly Today segment. It would help them find purpose. It would restore their hope.

Larissa died on May 10, after bringing hope and joy to my world for thirty-two years. Megyn Kelly did a live tribute. Mariah Carey tweeted her sorrow. Larissa left us with a message that no matter how bleak things seem, there is always hope, while hoping only that she would never be forgotten.
  
Paul Gionfriddo is President and CEO of Mental Health America. His twitter handle is @pgionfriddo, and his email is gionfriddopaul@gmail.com.

Comments

  1. How wonderfully and honestly written, Paul. It is so sad that Larissa died so young. But she will not be forgotten for the purpose with which she lived her life and the grace with which she died.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow!! Amazing story of hope, love, selflessness, and inspiration. Thank you for sharing this! I'm going to share this post with my 2 daughter's. I am sorry for your loss. Your daughter is a blessing to those of us who are still trying to make our way here on earth. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Mental Health Element in the Ferguson Story

By now, everyone has heard the news from Ferguson, Missouri.  An unarmed 18 year old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer.  Michael Brown was black. Some of the events surrounding the shooting are in dispute.  But what isn’t in dispute is that for the past two weeks, a community has been torn apart by race – a community that until recently was best known for its proximity to St. Louis and its designation as a Playful City, USA . Picture credit: Health Affairs Media reports since the August 9 th shooting have focused almost entirely on one angle – race relations.  We’ve heard about unrest in the city, the National Guard, police in riot gear, and danger in the streets.  We’ve heard about the District Attorney’s ties to law enforcement, and concerns that a too-white Grand Jury may be racially motivated not to indict the police officer involved in the deadly shooting. But the media have been strangely silent about a different angle – this comm

Celebrating Larissa Gionfriddo Podermanski Five Years Later

My daughter Larissa died of Metastatic Breast Cancer five years ago, in May of 2018.  She had only two wishes at the end. One was that we plant a tree for her. We did - in a Middletown CT city park - and it has grown straight and tall. The other was that she not be forgotten. Larissa's family and friends took pains to reassure that she could not be forgotten. If you were fortunate enough to know Larissa, you would know why. Still, I wondered how I might celebrate her a little more now that some years have passed, while sharing some of her memorable spirit with others (some who knew her and others who did not), while reminding us why she was such an extraordinary woman. In early 2017, Larissa started a blog called Metastatically Speaking, through which she chronicled her life with MBC. Unfortunately - and through no one's fault - her blog disappeared some time after her death. So, if you search for it now, you can't find it.  However, I was fortunate enough to see and retain

Judgment Day

Ironic. I was not as nervous as you would think on April 23 rd .  Martin, my mother and I drove up to Dana Farber.  All weekend I wanted plan for Poland, Barbados and Florida, as we brainstormed ideas of what could be attainable or possible. I started to realize I looked pregnant… but that couldn’t be. When the appointment began I noticed it felt like a routine visit. Everything went smoothly, but what were we focusing on? It was this: if I did nothing the outlook for me was living three weeks to a few months longer. So, is that my only option, I wanted to know?   No, I was told we can try a low dose chemo and see how it works.   Since it is low dose, they said, it won’t do much harm, but we truly don’t know how it will work. It’s not a treatment we have used a lot at low dose and technically you are in liver failure, leaving you with limited options.   Of course, the goal would still be to get you to be stable; however, this is a blind treatment. We don’t know if this approach w