Modeling Grace: Christine Handy’s Story of Survival

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Up next to a story from Christine Handy about survival, forgiveness, and strength. Here’s our own Monty Montgomery with the story. Christine Handy was born in Chicago and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. I’m certainly a Midwestern girl. I am a mother of two sons. I’m a motivational speaker. I’m a writer. I am a lot of things, including a model. So I started modeling when I was at the tender age of eleven. I loved it. I actually loved being a model. It was easy for me. I began to hone in on learning those skills, to brighten up and be in front of that camera, and it became something that I depended on. And throughout her career, Christine would lend modeling gigs at Pepsi, J. Crew, Petco, and Target, to name a few. But success, as great as it is, as its downsides, too, especially when success comes at such a young age. I missed a lot of things that were really important for my development. And I try not to blame anybody else because my parents weren’t really interested in me becoming a model. They had three other daughters, and it wasn’t their goal for me to become a model. But to be honest with you, when you have—I was obviously very attractive—and when you have people commenting on who you are, which was solely based on what I look like, you yearn for more of that attention. And when you’re that age, when you’re that young, you don’t realize is that other people are getting nurtured in other ways. Like when I would come home with my report card, and it would be straight A’s, I would be excited to show that to my parents. But I wasn’t getting a lot of attention for that. I was getting a lot of attention because I was getting bigger and bigger modeling campaigns, you know, like I had just gotten. I remember as a freshman in high school, I just gotten this big campaign with Pepsi, and I remember bringing my report card home, going, “Look at me, look at me! I’ve got straight A’s!” And it just—I wasn’t getting the foundation right. I wasn’t. My life wasn’t built on my mind, my brain, or inside, you know. I wasn’t learning self-introspection. I wasn’t learning self-worth. And most people at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. You know, society can correct them. Society’s applause was not correcting me. Society’s applause was pushing me forward to this narrative of depending on that outside beauty. So the external facade became my measure of myself, or so to speak. But I didn’t realize it at the time. I started to also develop an eating disorder a few years after I started to model. And part of the reason I believe that I started the eating disorder was because I had some sort of control in my life. When I felt out of control, right, I’d show up on set as a model, and the client might say, “Oh, your hair is not the right length,” or “Your blonde hair is too dark,” or “Your waist is too big,” or whatever they were criticizing me. For I knew that I can control what was going in and out of my body, and so that became kind of a lifeline for me—a very destructive one. And the longer I modeled, the quicker of the eating disorder blossom and ultimately erupted. And so I came home from my sophomore year in college, and I literally said to my parents. I sat him down and I said, “This thing—this eating disorder that all of us are ignoring—this thing exists, and it’s controlling me, and I can’t stop myself.” And so my mom looked at me and said, “I’ll take you to the hospital.” And I was there for thirty days, and it was great. I mean, I really I took it changed my life in a way because I didn’t have an eating disorder after that. So it worked. But when I was leaving the hospital, one of the nurses said to me, “Here’s a pack of gum,” and I said, “Well, what’s this for?” And she said, “Well, just in case you mess up, just in case, you know, you throw something up, chew a piece of gum.” And I thought to myself, “She doesn’t believe in me.” So, she’s a nurse, and she’s seen this before, so she doesn’t believe in me. Why would I? And so after that, it took a few years for me to really eliminate the any disorder because I went back to it a little bit, thinking in my mind, “Well, everybody goes back to it,” she told me. But it was that doubt, that doubt that I clung to. It wasn’t—it wasn’t the strong belief in myself that I had conquered this, right? It was that doubt that she had put inside of me. That’s what I clung to. By the age, you know, like late twenties, modeling had become a constant—became the biggest constant in my life. I felt strangely safe in front of the camera, and I felt confident, and I felt loved. But I was getting older, and I was starting to feel this yearning for something—meaning, purpose. I had no idea, but there was a slight emptiness inside of me. But I squandered those thoughts, and I reminded myself over and over again that the “next ups” in my life, or what I was living—I was supposed to get married, I was supposed to have kids. And at this point, my self-esteem was so dependent on society and the rules of the place of women. I was locked in, like that was my measure. I was living a performance-based life. I found out quickly that that beauty, that external despendency, was quicksand. And when you lose that, you better have some pretty strong foundation, and for me, I just didn’t. And you’ve been listening to Christine Handy talk about her struggle with, of all things, beauty. It can be a blessing, it can be a curse, like so many things in our lives. When we come back, more with Christine Handy and her life story. 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And we returned to Our American Stories and to Christine Handy’s story. When we last left off, Christine was at the top of her professional life, that being modeling. He had gotten gigs at Pepsi, J. Crew, Petco, and many more, but her life felt empty, and things were about to get harder. Here again, it’s Christine. So, I guess at this time, you know, being a wife and mother and staying in that box that I was living kind of got confusing for me because I still didn’t feel like I was enough, and what was missing, I believe, was who I was. I had no idea who I was. I often asked myself that. I would say to myself, “What do you like to do?” And I did a lot of things. I modeled. I took care of my house, my kids, and I was a wife. And I loved to my kids. I loved my job. But, you know, looking back, I was—I felt very lost. My soul was trying to figure out, you know, what was life about? And I really didn’t know. And so I would ask myself, like, “What do you like to do?” The things that popped into my brain were tennis, yoga, going to lunch with my friends and things like that. And I would stop myself and go, “Well, do you really like tennis?” And I couldn’t answer it. And so instead of taking the time… Now I’m in my late twenties. You’d think that I was mature enough at that point to sit myself down and saying, you know, really go through those questions. Instead of taking the time and the introspection work that I needed, I started to socialize more. Small talk became kind normal for me, you know, cocktail parties and shopping and materialism and trying to film myself up with things. Instead of controlling my portions and size and controlling my eating, I started to control my happiness by going to buy a new bag. And so I was just switching idols. And also, at that time, I would turn on the TV and I’d look at the network and Bravo, and I’d idolize those famous people and those wealthy characters in society that were displayed all over the networks. And, you know, my place keepers were falling apart—meaning, I was getting older, right? So I was aging, and crisises started to happen in my life. Stress anxiety began to become a stronghold in my life. I was numbing that, and soon a huge crisis would begin to unfold in Christine’s life. So, in two and eleven, I tore my right ligament, my right wrist, which is not that big of a deal, but it required surgery, and I picked the doctor who I believed would perform the best surgery. Not that I was worried that there would be any permanent problems because of it. My biggest concern at the time was that I was going to be out of yoga for six weeks. And so when the cast came off six weeks later, I did physical therapy in his office for a day, and then it was the weekend. And the next morning I woke up. It was Saturday morning, and my arm had ballooned. So my right arm looked like my thigh bone. Literally, it was a deep read. It was swollen, and the pain was grotesque. And so I gave it about twenty-four hours before I called the doctor on a Sunday, which was scary for me. I didn’t have enough self-worth to think that he would even take the call. And if he took the call, when he took the all, he acted put out. He acted put out, and so the shame that I had felt in my life was reinforced immediately. And when you are in intense pain, it’s hard to see what’s around you. It’s hard to listen to your inner warnings because, basically, you’re saying all your brain is telling you is, “Get out of pain! Get out of pain! Get out of pain!” And you have a marginalized perspective. For me, I was looking around, going, “Okay, I have to take care of my kids.” I can’t be in this pain. On that original conversation, on that Sunday, he told me I over-iced my arm, and so he said, “Take off the ice and leave it be,” and so I did. And I know that sounds crazy, that that was his prescription. And looking back now, it does sound crazy to me. But like I said, when you’re in that kind of pain and you’ve been taught that authority has the final set, they listen. He got the medical degree, not me. He’s the one that went to Stanford Medical School, not me. And so I trust in him, which is why Christine continued to see this doctor even though the pain refused to go away. Then, on one of her many visits to his office, he told her what he thought was causing it. He didn’t take an X-ray, he didn’t take a blood test. He looked at me and he said, “You have this thing called RSD.” It’s a disorder where your brain is telling your limb, which in my case was my arm, that there’s pain and swelling, but it’s really just in your head. And I thought, “Wow, I’ve never heard of this!” I can’t believe this thing called RSD can be causing this much pain. And so, subsequently, he sent me down the hallway to a different office, to a different doctor who was a pain management doctor, who concurred with his diagnosis. Christine then endured two nerve black surgeries, pain meds, and was sent to physical therapy. Yet nothing changed for months. The pain was still there. That was because her doctor had misdiagnosed her, and it was a random comment that finally led to Christine seeking other options. One day, I was on a walk, and one of the employees of the town said to me, “Hello.” And, you know, I said, “Hello,” and he stopped me and he said, “Is that a new cast?” And I looked down at my arm and I thought, “Wow, if the town’s worker noticed that I’m on my eighth or ninth cast, I need to see a second opinion!” And it was that day that I picked up the phone and called a friend and I said, “I know you have an orthopedic doctor that is your friend. Do you think you could call and get me in?” This doctor would agree to see her, and Christine would finally get the answers she needed to know. The doctor came into the examination office and he said, “I know your doctor.” He’s very well-liked, and he has a great reputation. “Let’s take a look at your arm. Let me take an X-ray.” So he took an X-ray, and I came back into the room. And he came in like ten minutes later, and he was pasty white, and he asked my husband to come outside with him for a moment. And now I started to really worry. And they both came back and said, “Every bone in your wrist is broken.” All those bones have broken and fallen into a pile at the base of your wrist. There is no cartilage left, which means you have an infection that has been undiagnosed. “I’m going to put you in surgery today. I’m canceling the rest of my day, and I’m going to dig out as much infection as possible. I have no idea what I’m going to find. I have no idea what the outcome will be, but I know for a fact that we have to get in there today.” Christine was then sent to a specialist in New York and was told she would never have functioned in her right wrist. Again, her arm was fused, and on one of her many trips back to New York, received even more bad news. My farm was fused in twenty eleven. And so I was just trying to figure out, now, with bone graps in my arm and cadaver—a cadaver bone that replaced my broken bones—how I was going to live for the rest of my life and be a mom, and be, you know, do laundry and drive and cook and all those things that I did. How I was going to do those. And so here’s where the story gets a little bit more tricky. I was in a hotel room in New York City and I went into the shower to shower, and I immediately felt a lump in my breast. And five days later, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. And you’ve been listening to Christine Handy tell her harrowing story, and my goodness, just having gotten through so much in her life—from an eating disorder to just an emptiness in her life, a recurring feeling that she didn’t know who she was. As she said it, “I didn’t feel like I was enough.” And my goodness, in this country, it’s so easy to feel that way, man or a woman. So much is coming at us, and then a misdiagnosis, and then an actual correct diagnosis: cancer. When we come back, we’ll find out what happens next in the life of Christine Handy. Here an Our American Story.