The first call Robin Quivers made after learning that something might be very wrong with her was to Howard Stern. She was surprised at what he had to say.
“He immediately started talking in terms of ‘we,’ as in, ‘Oh my God, what are “we” going to do?’ ” she recalls. “It was just such an odd thing to say. What did he mean, ‘we’?”
In time, Stern’s longtime sidekick learned precisely what he meant. As listeners of Sirius XM Radio’s “The Howard Stern Show” now know, Quivers was ultimately diagnosed with a form of endometrial cancer and underwent a 12-hour operation in May 2012 to remove a tumor the “size of a grapefruit” from her pelvis.
Stern was there every step of the way, advising her at every turn. When she decided to get a second opinion following the surgery, Stern actually took over.
“Howard told me that he was going to get me the best help, the most up-to-date treatment and anything else I needed,” Quivers tells the Daily News. “He went to work and all I had to do was show up for the appointments and take the phone calls.
“I don’t think I would be here at all if it weren’t for Howard.”
Quivers says her other survival tools can be found in her new book out Tuesday, “The Vegucation of Robin,” where she details the healthy lifestyle she adopted some years back that she believes helped save her life. Her doctors were consistently amazed at how the vegetable-loving 61-year-old could take anything they threw at her.
“My oncologist told me, ‘I am going to dub you the best patient ever,’ ” she recalls. “He said he spent all his time on the phone with patients saying they couldn’t take it anymore, they couldn’t take the nausea, or other effects.
“I never called. None of that was happening to me.”
Quivers was in Pittsburgh last year attending a wedding when a distended abdomen sent her to the emergency room in the middle of the night. She was drained of fluid and sent home alarmed.
“I was sent home with the knowledge that you need to go get looked at and you need to get looked at quickly,” says Quivers.
She called Stern merely looking for a gynecological referral from his wife, Beth. Stern racked his brain before blurting out: “Who’s the biggest hypochondriac we know?!”
The answer was their mutual agent, Don Buchwald, whose recommendation began a medical journey that started with the hugely invasive surgery. Leading up to it, there were harrowing conversations between the two friends and co-hosts.
Stern revealed recently on their Sirius XM show that at that point he was “already making funeral arrangements.”
“Howard … was getting all his medical information from me,” Quivers points out. “I was horrified by the procedure as it was described to me and I told the doctor that I wouldn’t make it.
“I didn’t know a body could take that much punishment.”
In fact, she had been unknowingly prepping her body for years to withstand the worst. As she writes in “The Vegucation of Robin,” at 49 she was experiencing such aches, pains and exhaustion that even simply getting dressed was a “full body workout.
“Gradually you realize you are not functioning at your normal level, and then you realize you’re not functioning at a level anyone considers normal,” she says of those bad old days before she discovered the power of juice.
“I had to have rest periods between the shower and getting on the pantyhose.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, Quivers realized with a shock that she wouldn’t have been able to escape walking down hundreds of stairs.
“I had always been a self-sufficient, independent person, but now I was shuffling toward dependence,” she writes.
“I couldn’t even save my own life.”
Quivers first did the Master Cleanse detox, swilling lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup for 21 days. She lost weight and felt wonderful. But when she returned to real food, things didn’t go so well. A book she read about in the Daily News, “21 Pounds in 21 Days: The Martha’s Vineyard Diet Detox,” caught her eye and one of the authors, Roni DeLuz, helped her back on the path to health.
Later, Sara Soulati, a cardio-care expert who uses nutrition preventively, fast-tracked her. Quivers became a dedicated vegan and quite the juicehead. She includes more than 90 recipes, from smoothies to plant-based main courses, in the book.
She didn’t know that being healthy would matter so much when she fell ill.
Following the operation, her then-doctors were talking about merely prolonging her life. She says her diagnosis was “murky in that most endometrial cancer would be termed uterine cancer, but I had had endometriosis so the cancerous tissue was in my pelvic region.”
Quivers didn’t want her life prolonged, she wanted a cure. So with Stern’s help, she switched to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There, she committed to a long course of radiation with two chemo treatments at the beginning and end.
“There’s a pervasive feeling that these treatments are devastating and going to do horrible things to the people who take them,” says Quivers. “They kept saying, ‘You are going to feel the fatigue a couple of treatments in.’ Then it was next week. Then it was, ‘Everybody gets tired and eventually you are going to feel this.’ “
It didn’t happen.
“I said to my doctor, if I get any less fatigued, I’m going to fly,” Quiver laughs, noting that by the end she was doing the radio show in the morning, having dinner with friends and taking in a Broadway show on a typical day.
In fact, throughout the ordeal she only missed two days on-air. Quivers even took the chemo well, reporting to Stern that she got a wonderful night’s sleep afterward.
“Leave it to you to love chemo,” he snarled.
This Wednesday, after working at home for the duration of her illness, she’ll rejoin Stern in the studio. Early on, the shock jock told her he didn’t want to continue with the radio show if something happened to her. The pair has been together since 1981.
“It’s hard to even put into words what that friendship means,” she says.
Three months ago, Quivers was declared cancer free. She celebrated over the summer.
“I got a new house on the Jersey Shore. I just decided I wanted to give myself a big present. I said, you deserve that because you have been through a lot, lady.
“A lot.”
Robin Quivers will be appearing at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, 33 E. 17th St. on Wed., Oct. 9, at 7 p.m.
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