Keeping secrets isn't easy for a born-and-bred journalist like TPT's Mary Lahammer. That's one reason she's both relieved and eager to share news that she's kept within a small circle for two years: She has multiple sclerosis, or MS.
Another reason has to do with the response she's received from some of us in that circle who are old enough to remember when MS was a sure crippler and a death sentence.
It isn't any longer, Lahammer says.
Don't chalk up that assurance to an athlete's determination or a young mother's resolve, though at a vigorous age 39, she has both. Rather, I heard a journalist's summation of two years of in-depth reporting among world-leading MS experts at Rochester's Mayo Clinic, where she is a patient.
Lahammer would have gone public with her MS story earlier, but for the urging of her Mayo doctors to live with the disease for two years first. Despite a much-improved prognosis since new drug therapies became available in recent years, multiple sclerosis remains unpredictable and highly variable. Doctors wanted Lahammer to experience for herself what it means to say that MS is a manageable disorder.
Now that the two years have passed, she is on a mission to tell today's MS story, starting with Friday's episode of "Almanac," her regular venue.
"My job is to share information," she said last week. "Creating a new, young, vibrant face of this disease is important to convincing people with symptoms to get diagnosed early," which lessens the chance that MS will cause permanent disability. "If I can educate people about MS, I think I can help."
There's the same professional credo I knew and admired in Mary's father, former Associated Press Capitol reporter Gene Lahammer. It holds that reliable reporting about community interests is a force for good. If that's true of state politics and government, where the Lahammers have focused the bulk of their professional energy, it holds double when the interests in question are disease, mortality and quality of life.