Story of Their Lives   

Students at West Virginia University immerse themselves for a year with cancer patients for a compelling project that includes a documentary, a book and a Web site.

By spending a year with people fighting cancer, you could say that West Virginia University journalism students learned rather a lot.

To even begin making as expansive a documentary as "Cancer Stories: Lessons in Love, Loss and Hope," they had to figure out a concrete basic: How do I get people at perhaps the lowest point in their lives to talk to me? With that mastered they could consider thornier issues, like should you call an interview timeout if someone is clenched in pain? Or, when a mastectomy victim takes her shirt off for a doctor, should the camera be there? Or, if the grandmother who's baked you banana bread, whom you've known for months now, gets a terminal diagnosis, would it be wrong to cry?

The idea and money for the project came from a West Virginia man whose father had died of cancer. He proposed journalism students profile people with cancer so that other patients, hospital staff and even the community at large could better understand how the disease affects people, not just their bodies but their day-to-day lives. His $100,000 donation enabled the school to buy equipment and staff the project.

Christine Martin, dean of WVU's P.I. Reed School of Journalism, says the project aspired to be "an unflinching, very intimate telling of a story that wouldn't sugar-coat, that showed all the details that most brochures and books don't." Things, she says, like "What do you do when your hair falls out? What do you do when you look sick and your children are afraid you're going to die?"

Martin says the donor specifically wanted students to do this, people who he felt wouldn't taint the project with cynicism, innocent listeners, maybe a little green, who didn't think they already knew the story.

The school won total support from WVU's Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center, giving the young documentary-makers access to every aspect of treatment--cameras were allowed at each appointment and surgery, and doctors didn't shy away from interviews.

Maryanne Reed, an associate professor who coordinated the making of the documentary, says the cancer center hesitated at first but that "ultimately, as the students demonstrated their sensitivity and their ability to blend in, the doctors became more convinced as to the value of the project." "It's really a credit to the students," she says. "People were eventually able to be themselves."

The students, about 30 of them, handpicked for the project as the school's brightest, learned everything from shooting and lighting to editing and producing to reporting and writing long-form stories. All those things and the skills that went beyond the trade, Reed says, "larger life lessons about committing to a project, working as a team, sharing responsibilities and learning how to strike a balance between being an objective journalist and being a compassionate person."

Plus, Reed says, with the project the students were living and breathing one of the industry's biggest buzzwords: convergence. Print students worked alongside broadcast students who worked alongside photojournalists to put together not only the documentary but a corresponding Web site and book, which are still in production.

Students spent months with patients and their families including a buoyant grandmother who considers it her job to make the nurses laugh though they know she's got little chance of beating her ever-advancing cancer, an artist and mom whose devastating breast cancer makes her the latest in her family's long line of cancer casualties, a blue-collar worker who's diagnosed with skin cancer just weeks after his wife leaves him with their two kids.

Reed says among the biggest challenges was getting the students to move outside their comfort zones to capture the more defining moments. Like when Pam, the artist and mom, breaks down after hearing her cancer has spread. Or when the seemingly brusque doctor treating Geraldine, the smiley grandmother, fights back tears when he pauses to come up with an answer after a student asks how he handles seeing patients like Geraldine die--all the time.

In the beginning, Reed says, when students observed the patients hurting or upset, they'd get flustered and, forgetting the camera, look for a tissue to offer or another way to help. But they got past that. Sally-Ann Cruikshank, now 23, asked Geraldine's doctor the question that made him cry. Now graduated and a producer at Clarksburg, West Virginia's WDTV, Cruikshank says she almost couldn't do it, but working on the project taught her you have to ask.

And Cruikshank, whose own mother died of cancer when she was in eighth grade, learned a bit about how to take a story personally but still be professional. The patient she followed, Geraldine, was the only one to die during the filming.

The students, and the faculty who worked alongside them, wrapped the yearlong filming with 300 hours of tape to whittle into a one-hour film. The professors helped with the editing, as did an award-winning editor at the local public broadcasting station, which premiered the film in December.

The students got course credit for their work, but it ended up being primarily something they did on their own time, squeezing in visits to the cancer center and to patients' homes between classes, part-time jobs and internships. "It really was a tremendous amount of time and energy," Reed says. "So much beyond anything you might expect in a traditional teacher-student experience."

Martin hopes that as the students involved in the project embark on their careers, they'll remember what it was like to work like this, covering something from the heart.

Jennifer Roush thinks she'll remember. As the student who followed the artist patient named Pam, Roush had a hard time balancing her role as a journalist, there to record the pain, and as friend--because after all those months with Pam, she was undeniably a friend. Now 24 and a reporter for the Fairmont Times West Virginian, Roush knows that covering eight small towns, she won't likely get a chance to go in-depth like she did with the project. But she now knows the meaning of thorough reporting, the value of being there and how to spot a defining moment. "This kind of situation," she says, "is what we're all in it for."