Taking the Lead: A medical reporter doesn’t let a cancer diagnosis stand in her way

By Pamela Ferdinand | Spring-Summer 2010 for CR Magazine

It’s time to tango and the competition is hot at the 2008 “Dancing With Chicago Celebrities”—an annual charity ball to benefit breast cancer research. As the beat begins, a professional dance instructor, his black shirt unbuttoned, emerges from the wings. With a dramatic flourish, he pulls a scarlet cloth up and away from a mysterious figure crouched on the dance floor, revealing a woman in a shiny silver halter top, strappy high heels, and a thigh-baring, flouncy red skirt. Dina Bair—an award-winning broadcast journalist at WGN-TV News in Chicago, who is familiar to viewers more for her health care reporting than her boleo—stands up and clasps her partner’s hand. She twirls into his arms. Together they dance with swiveling hips and high kicks, taking the championship.

Few in the crowd could have guessed that prior to the competition, Bair didn’t even know how to dance. But undoubtedly many did know that she has a reputation for not shying away from a challenge. She learned how to swim so that she could enter a triathlon. She shared with television viewers her thrilling rides in an F-16 fighter jet (for a story on the physical demands of pilots) and in a V-22 Osprey Hybrid military troop transport aircraft (for a story on how Marines get supplies in combat zones). She ran up 94 floors of the John Hancock Center in less than 19 minutes during an event to benefit the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago. And last year for the same charity, she took a skyline plunge off the roof of a city hotel and rappelled down 27 stories.

Added to that, this mom of four—who also gives Sunday communion as a Eucharistic minister—runs, boxes, lifts weights, and kayaks.

“She doesn’t feel like there’s anything that she can’t conquer or be,” says Lou Kleinberg, Bair’s husband of 16 years. “She is one of the strongest and smartest people I know.”

Katharin Czink, a medical producer at WGN-TV News, who has been Bair’s friend and colleague for nearly a decade, agrees.

“There is no doubt Dina is and always has been driven. But when it comes to physical tests of endurance, strength and speed, she is off the charts,” Czink says. “Would I say Dina is fearless? No. Because I think fear is an emotion that motivates her. She’s acutely aware of her own mortality, which is why she doesn’t let much stand in her way.”

Her spirit and determination have made Bair, 42, a success. She is a dogged, compassionate reporter (and principal back-up anchor) known for the thoroughness and accuracy of her “Medical Watch” segments on WGN-TV News. She has won five Emmy Awards, a Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and multiple Associated Press awards, among others. And, as she has let her audience know, she is a cancer survivor.

Slender with fine features and straight polished hair, Bair is stylish at work on a weekday in November in shiny patent brown high heels and a brown fitted jacket with a brocade pattern. She is generous with her smile, warmly calling people “honey” and is clearly well-liked. She has more than 2,000 “friends” on her Facebook page and laughs when asked about fans who consider her “hot.”

“It’s hysterical to me. I’m an old mom,” Bair says. “It’s not like I don’t try to look good, but it always cracks me up because if people could see me on the weekends, it’s totally different. I’m not this glam TV lady.”

Growing up outside Philadelphia as one of two children, Bair had an early inkling that she was destined for journalism. At age 10, while shopping for groceries with her mother, Bair would report from the aisles, making up stories about how, for example, the police had just apprehended a robbery suspect, much to the relief of worried shoppers. As a teenager, she aired daily news announcements on her high school TV station’s morning program, “Wake Up O’Hara,” which was also broadcast on a local cable channel.

She went on to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., earning a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film in 1989 in just three years. In lieu of her senior year, the 21-year-old Bair lined up an internship with Joan Esposito, who was a well-known anchor at the ABC affiliate in Chicago. When Esposito moved to NBC’s WMAQ-TV, she hired Bair as a field producer to assist with interviews, log tapes and write scripts.

It didn’t take long for Bair to establish herself as an on-air talent. After stints as a producer, anchor and reporter at other stations, she joined WGN as a full-time general assignment reporter in September 1994. She anchored the weekend morning news for five years until she became pregnant with twins in 1998 and her doctor cautioned her to take it easy. The station assigned her short medical stories instead of news reporting during the week, and the pieces were a hit. Given her interest in science and health, she became the resident medical reporter and over the past 11 years has transformed “Medical Watch” into a ratings and revenue success.

“Just as she is quick on her feet in a physical sense, Dina is equally so as a reporter and writer,” says Czink. “She is whip smart. She simply does not miss a beat.”

Jennifer Lyons, WGN’s assistant news director and Bair’s close friend, agrees. They became friends in 1998 when they were assigned to cover the elevation of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago to cardinal, and instantly clicked on the flight to Rome.

“We’re both tenacious, we’re both dedicated, we’re both a little bit on the perfectionist side,” Lyons says.

In what she considers the most rewarding project of her career to date, Bair spent a month reporting inside the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Her four-part series “Intensive Caring” won a regional Emmy award in the 2000-2001 hard news feature series category. In one segment, Bair profiled two sisters, both younger than 2, with the same kind of rare and deadly brain tumor. In another, she showed a physician telling the parents of a young boy, on Christmas Day, that their son was not going to live. She says she would come home at night to her own children, sit on the edge of their beds, watch them sleep and cry in gratitude.

“By far, that series exceeds anything else I’ve done,” she says. “I felt like I had put something on television that made people think and made them talk to one another as a family about life issues.”

Bair knows a thing or two about life issues. Five years ago, her brother died suddenly at age 33 due to a blood clot, devastating their mother and changing the way Bair approached her own life. “Always in control, I began to appreciate and enjoy so much more,” she says.

It wasn’t her first brush with illness. Sixteen years earlier, when she was 21, Bair had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, an unusual occurrence in a woman so young. Away from her parents and alone at college, she was misdiagnosed for about four months by doctors who thought her abdominal pain was due to menstrual cramps.

She had surgery to remove one ovary and radiation therapy. The treatments rendered the cancer undetectable, but her future fertility remained uncertain. “I was told then that my fertility was in question,” Bair recalls. “Because of the radiation, the only way to know would be to try to have kids. I was 21—that wasn’t an option.”

Five years later, she met her husband, who is now a news photographer for the local CBS station, when both worked the nightshift at an ABC television station in Peoria, Ill. When they began discussing marriage, Bair told Kleinberg she might not be able to have children. She reiterated it the day he proposed.

“When my husband asked me to marry him, one of the first things I said to him was, ‘I might not be able to have children with you. Are you sure you want to marry me?’ ” she recalls.

Ultimately, her worries proved groundless, though fertility drugs were necessary for the couple to conceive their first three children: Max, 13, and twins Ben and Cameron, 11. Their youngest, Gianna, 4, however, was a welcome surprise.

But then came another, far-less-welcome discovery. About four years ago, while nursing her baby daughter, Bair noticed for the first time a nearly black spot on her chest that resembled a crawling ant. She called her dermatologist. Learning he was booked solid for the next month, she pressed for an appointment, describing how the spot, which was not a raised mole, still met suspicious criteria: irregular in shape and color, rapidly growing. “I said, ‘I think I might have skin cancer,’ and then I felt foolish even saying it,” she says.

Her instinct was correct. When she finally saw a doctor weeks later, he looked at the spot and said, “You need to come back tomorrow and have that taken out,” Bair recalls. Pathology results showed it was melanoma. Subsequent surgery was required to remove a golf ball–size mass where the melanoma had invaded her breast; she then had radiation. In 2008, Bair learned that the melanoma had metastasized to her liver, and she had surgery to remove the part of the liver that was affected.

These days, Bair says she doesn’t shy away from occasional bouts of self-pity—“You need to let it out and acknowledge the fact that cancer stinks,” she says—but she has channeled her personal experience with cancer into public service through her work and numerous charity appearances, including the American Cancer Society’s Black and White Ball, the March on Melanoma and the LUNGevity Foundation Fundraiser.

A decade ago, Bair spoke for the first time about having ovarian cancer at a local fundraiser for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, and the warm reception was a revelation. She went public with her melanoma diagnosis and treatment during a May 2007 “Medical Watch” segment on sun protection and skin cancer.

Lyons, the assistant news director, says the challenges Bair has faced have given her a powerful ability to translate medical news for the average person.

“She can walk with the patients, and she can walk with the doctors, and really tell a good story,” says Lyons.

Bair doesn’t claim to know it all. Nor does she pretend to. Journalism allows her to tell stories, to share her interest in science, and to help other survivors—regardless of their condition—know they are not alone.

“I have enough of a healthy curiosity where I ask the questions people at home would be asking,” she says. “That’s one of the things I love the most—being able to communicate things about health and wellness in a way people understand. They call me all the time, saying, ‘I didn’t know about this or that but because of your story, I went to the doctor.’ I really do have the ability to touch people’s lives in a way that makes me feel really good.”