Ailing Anchor, Las Vegas Sun

Channel 13 reporter goes full-speed despite battle with arthritis Lisa Sciortino Monday, June 3, 1996 | 11:59 a.m. Her pain is constant: a stiff, crippling ache that attacks her body without rhyme or reason. It started in her left hand, causing the middle finger to "swell up like a sausage," and eventually went into her shoulders. Now it has struck her right hand and ankle. The stiffness is there when she wakes in the morning, so intense at times that brushing her teeth is "like pumping weights," she says. It's there at night, too, after her 10-hour workday. "I feel like the Tin Man. I feel like my joints need to be oiled," she says. But you'd never know by watching KTNV Channel 13 investigative reporter Angela Rodriguez on the 5 o'clock newscast that she's suffering from psoriatic arthritis. And she prefers it that way. "I don't want people to feel sorry for me," Rodriguez says. "I do that enough for myself." But some days, "it's a feeling of, 'If they only knew how much pain I was in right now as I'm sitting in front of this camera reading this story.'" As the name suggests, psoriatic arthritis affects people -- 20 to 30 percent of them, ages 20 to 50 -- who suffer from the scaly skin disease psoriasis. Arthritic symptoms can include pain and swelling of some joints, usually the wrists, knees, ankles, fingers and toes. Pitting, or small depressions of the finger and toenails, is also common. A red, peeling patch on Rodriguez's scalp confirmed the diagnosis four years ago by Dr. Micheal Colletti, a local rheumatologist. But not before she underwent a laundry list of tests for other diseases -- multiple sclerosis, lupus and cancer among them. "We just hit the panic button," she recalls. "I went through all these different thoughts. "I'm 31 years old, I'm not married. What kind of a life am I gonna have a couple of years from now? What about when I have kids, are they gonna have arthritis? Am I ever gonna marry a man who wants to be with a woman with arthritis?" To make matters worse, Colletti says, Rodriguez also has fibromyalgia, a benign muscle condition that causes pain and soreness, which is "probably accounting for some of her pain." "I don't anticipate this being a devastating arthritis illness for her," Colletti says. "You look at her in the last four years, it's not like she's not ... leading a full life." She's "lucky," he says, that the arthritis hasn't severely affected her. You'd have a tough time convincing Rodriguez of that, though. Recently, she and a photographer were hotfooting it through McCarran International Airport on a story about Las Vegas' illegal immigration woes. "Oh man, that almost killed me," she says. "I was trailing further and further behind" as the pain in her ankle worsened. "I honestly just wanted to sit down in the middle of the airport and say, 'I can't take it anymore. I give up.' That was probably one of the worst days I've ever had." When she got home, "I had to pry my shoe off because my ankle and my foot had swollen up so badly." No 'prissy' reporter Career-wise, the diagnosis couldn't have come at a worse time. She was in the midst of sculpting her "sexy, strong, willful" reporter image, which included "miniskirts and high heels." "That was what I looked at myself as and wanted other people to view me as," she says. "To find out that I had arthritis was almost like I had to admit I had a weak spot. I thought people were gonna look at me now as the reporter who might be crippled one day." This from a pro who used to pride herself on carrying the tripod and pulling camera cables for photographers during live shots. "I've never been a prissy reporter. I need to get out there and do that." But these days, "I'm just not up to helping." "I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to put the high heels back on," she says glancing at the strappy black patent leather sandals she now sports. "If I have to wear designer suits with Reeboks to get the job done, so be it." Proof that her news-gathering spirit hasn't faltered, says Channel 13 News Director Ed Chapuis. "Angie is a lightening rod in the newsroom. You can tell by how often she gravitates toward the lead news. Whatever problems or physical ailments she has, she puts those aside. "I've seen her laboring to walk without pain (but) I don't think she ever uses it as an excuse or a crutch. She seems to feel that it's one more thing that you have to get through for the day." "As long as I'm here," Rodriguez says, "it's almost like you have to put on a show. You have to pretend everything's normal, even if it's not." Her persistence paid off recently when she was awarded the Chris Harris Television Reporter of the Year Award by the Associated Press Television-Radio Association of California-Nevada. Rodriguez says the honor made her pain seem bearable, at least for a little while. After "all those days that I wanted to give up so badly, somebody recognized that I'm here, that I'm doing a good job, that I'm doing what I want to be doing, and it made me feel great." Not working out Half of Rodriguez's battle with arthritis has been waged in her head, as she's slowly learned to deal with her chronic pain. The last year has been a trying one, she says, likely due to the flare-up in her ankle for which she recently received outpatient treatment -- a series of injections directly into the bone -- at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. "I always said if the pain is in my hand, if the pain is in my shoulders, I can still work, but if it ever got into my legs or my feet, it would be so hard for me to perform my job every day," she says. Not to mention having to abandon her active lifestyle. During her high school days, the petite Rodriguez was able to bench-press her own body weight and then some. She'd kicked around the idea of becoming a professional bodybuilder. "I used to work out, I'd bike ride, I'd go out dancing. I can't do those things anymore. For me to pick up a 5-pound dumbbell is painful." In fact, she hasn't set foot inside a gym in over two years. "I just got so jealous of looking at the women ... with the muscles and the tone and it was just killing me to know that I couldn't go and do the bench press. All the memories of how athletic I used to be came back." These days she gingerly works out at home, light weights and stretching exercises "that actually have made me feel a lot better." But as far as pain relief goes, that's about it. Pain relief Rodriguez says there's not much she can do, outside of downing the various pain medications she's been prescribed over the years. She avoids taking them, though, unless she's in dire need of relief. Hot baths and showers don't help, she says. Neither does crying her eyes out all night. Nor drinking. A while back, she had taken to sipping several glasses of wine each night to help her cope, a self-prescribed treatment that lasted about four months. "Goodness only knows it relieved the pain," she says with a chuckle, "but then I would sit there and be depressed because I knew what I was doing was wrong. I just had to cut myself off before I started developing a problem." She's grateful for the constant moral support she's received from her mother, Dot, a teacher at Harris Elementary School, and father, Rod, a retired U.S. Army command sergeant major. "They're comforting when they need to be, but my father especially kicks me in the pants. He says, 'You don't have any choice. You've got to keep going, you can't give up.'" "I was raised as a fighter, very disciplined," she says. "There was never any room for self-pity at my house, no matter how tough you have it. That strength at home has helped me now." Also, "I would have been a lot worse off" without the shoulder of her boyfriend, local attorney Tim Williams, to cry on. "He understands that I just don't feel good today. I just want to sit here and cry, I just want to sit here and drink and feel sorry for myself." But Rodriguez assures that her self-destructive days are behind her. Her new "plan of attack" includes adopting a more "honest policy" with herself and others. "If I don't feel good, I'm gonna tell you that I don't feel good," she says. "I'm not Superwoman. I may come as close as I can be to Superwoman, but I'm not."