A firm decision made by Etti Zohar, 45, three years ago probably saved the life of her husband, Lior, 49. Two of their three daughters have Crohn’s disease, a chronic intestinal disease diagnosed when they were young. Etti decided that she and Lior should have colonoscopies “to see if Crohn’s disease was coming from one of us,” she explains. “I thought we needed to check what was happening in our intestines. Lior didn’t want to do the test. For him, if everything was fine, there was no reason to go to the hospital. But I pushed him.”
Lior: “She went to our health fund to get referrals for both of us, but since we were under 50, they wouldn’t approve them. She argued with everyone there. When I went to the gastroenterologist, she asked me, ‘Why are you here?’ told me, “Oh, you’re the husband of that crazy girl who was here” and gave me a reference. I started the test feeling pretty smug. I thought I was okay.
Lior and Etti Zohar
(Photo: Yaron Sharon)
Etti: “We did the tests one after the other. Then the doctor called us and said: ‘Etti, everything is normal with you. But Lior, you have a tumor the size of a tennis ball in your intestine.’ We were in shock. He hadn’t felt anything. We left stunned and sat in a cafe to think about what we had heard.
Lior: “My thoughts were racing. How was I going to get through this? What about the girls? What had I accomplished in life? What hadn’t I done? What would happen financially? The uncertainty was overwhelming. In the evenings I would read articles about colorectal cancer and in the mornings I would go to work. I was a zombie. People at work would ask me, ‘Why do you look like that?’ I said, ” Everything is fine” and I continued to walk. I hope that people were not offended by me during this period. It was only after three weeks that I changed my mindset and decided to stop reading medical materials, start thinking positively and focus on things to do.
Meanwhile, while they were waiting for Lior’s biopsy results, Etti discovered a lump in her breast.
“I don’t usually check, but something made me feel my breast,” she recalled. “I felt a small lump in the middle of my right breast. When Lior came home from work, I told him about it and he suggested I get it checked. I wanted to postpone it because I felt very healthy and thought it was probably a cyst. But a week later, a lymph node under my armpit swelled like a small ping-pong ball. I immediately made an appointment with a breast surgeon, who referred me for tests.
“During the mammogram, I could see something was wrong with the technician, but she didn’t say anything because she wasn’t allowed to. The sonographer didn’t say anything either. The next day, the imaging center called me and asked me to come back for another test. I had another mammogram and an ultrasound, and the doctor said, ‘You know what I have to tell you.’ asked to explain and he replied: “You have a cancerous tumor and it is aggressive.” The shock was indescribable how there could be two cases in the same outbreak at the same time.
Lior: “I collapsed. It was even more difficult than knowing my own diagnosis. When they discovered my tumor, I knew that Etti was strong and that our house would not collapse. When I learned that she also had a tumor, I said to myself: That’s it. We’re screwed. We cried together and from that moment on, we decided that we were going to fight. In fact, I asked a chatbot what the chances of both spouses being diagnosed with cancer in the same month, and he answered: one in hundreds of millions.”
Etti was told she would need surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. “As it was an aggressive, fast-spreading tumor, it had to be treated immediately. When we told the girls, they cried and asked, ‘We just found out about Dad. How can you have it too?” No one could understand how this was possible. Some people asked us to replace the mezuzahs in our house, and we did it.
Etti, is there a history of cancer in your family?
“Both of my mother’s sisters had breast cancer and, thank God, they recovered. That’s why I made sure to have a mammogram and ultrasound every year. But my tumor was not hereditary.”
Lior and Etti Zohar during treatment
(Photo: Private album)
Etti has a beauty salon attached to their home in Hadera. Lior has worked at Elbit for 22 years. They have three daughters aged 21, 18 and 13.
The couple met during their military service. He was a fire control systems technician in the Ordnance Corps, assigned to an armored battalion, and she served as a technical operator in the same corps.
“One day, he saw me at the 188th brigade, gave me a note with his telephone number and asked me to call him,” says Etti.
“I was drawn to her like a magnet,” Lior explains. “We started dating and after two weeks I told a friend, ‘This is the woman I want to marry.'”
Both remained in the army as career soldiers. They married and lived in Katzrin. After leaving the army, they moved to Rishon Lezion and then to Hadera.
They underwent treatment and recovery together, only telling loved ones about their illness after both had undergone biopsies and received a formal diagnosis.
“A week after telling my father, he had a heart attack and underwent a cardiac catheterization,” says Lior.
Although Lior was diagnosed first, Etti started chemotherapy before him, at Beilinson Hospital, part of Rabin Medical Center.
“During the first treatment, I felt like I was choking. Lior quickly called the nurses, who gave me more steroids. After 12 treatments, I had no energy.”
During this time, Lior enrolled in a rectal cancer study led by Professor Baruch Brenner, described below. He was told he would need radiation and chemotherapy, but likely would not need surgery.
“Because I had accompanied Etti to her chemotherapy treatments, I knew what I was getting into. And the chemo really knocked me out. I had all kinds of side effects, including losing my voice for a week and a half.”
Etti: “When I was in treatment, Lior supported me, and vice versa. I had days off and days off, and we tried to cheer each other up. Once we had chemotherapy together, in chairs side by side. That week was particularly difficult.”
Lior: “Because we were both in chemotherapy at the same time, we understood each other without a word. When Etti came home from treatment, I knew exactly how she felt and what muscle pain she would have the next day. When I was in treatment, Etti knew exactly when I would need a glass of water. This period strengthened our relationship.”
Did you let yourself collapse?
Etti: “No, because we wanted our house to remain stable and strong, for everything to continue as usual and for us to be there for the girls. We knew we had to continue and see the good. Everyone was there for us: our parents, our siblings, our friends, our neighbors. Our eldest daughter helped a lot and became the big one in the house. Despite all the difficulties, we tried to be there for the girls, who underwent therapy to help them cope.”
Forgive me for asking, but have you discussed the possibility of one of you surviving and the other not?
Etti: “No, and we didn’t write a will either, because I didn’t think it would happen. Something always told me that I would find a hidden strength within me to help me cope. We knew this would pass.”
Lior: “It was a very scary thought. We didn’t prepare a will or any other document, but it was weighing on us. I reviewed my benefits with Etti, my pension fund and my continuing education fund, and we tried to look at things in a positive way.”
When Etti began an innovative chemotherapy treatment combined with biological therapy, her condition began to deteriorate.
“I felt very bad. I vomited constantly and I couldn’t swallow anything,” she remembers. “Lior was exhausted from chemotherapy, so my brother took me to the emergency room of another hospital. They examined me and found that my immune system was severely weakened. They put me in isolation and started giving me nutritional support.”
Lior: “At night, after all the medical staff had gone home, I would sneak out to see her. When your hearts are drawn to each other, you can’t fight.”
Etti: “My memories of that time are hazy. I didn’t have the strength to speak or even hold my phone. They transferred me to Beilinson, where they tried to figure out what was wrong. I felt like my body was betraying me and there were days when I was quite disconnected. I couldn’t communicate and didn’t know what was going on with my family. I felt like I had no control over my life. Looking back, those were the the most difficult moments of this whole ordeal.”
Lior: “When they put a feeding tube on Etti, that was the scariest moment for me. She was lying there like a sack of potatoes. She was completely beside herself.”
After two weeks in Beilinson, oncologist Prof. Rinat Yerushalmi Misheli identified the problem. Etti had developed Addison’s disease, a condition affecting the adrenal glands that prevented her body from producing cortisol.
“It was caused by the biologic medication they gave me. Things still haven’t returned to normal and I’m taking steroids to replace the hormone the glands should be producing.”
Once the problem was identified and the biological treatment was stopped, Etti had to undergo surgery to remove the tumor and four lymph nodes. After recovering from the operation, she completed chemotherapy and then underwent radiation therapy. Treatment ended two years ago and both have remained in follow-up care since then.
Did you change your lifestyle after your recovery?
Etti: “When I was 9 years old, I almost drowned on Argaman beach in Acre, where I grew up. The waves carried me into the deep waters and I didn’t know how to swim. I felt myself slipping. Fortunately,…
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