The Bigger Picture

Anna Roppo knew something was wrong the minute her longtime family doctor dropped the ‘F’ bomb.

It was 2016, and Roppo, a litigator at Duckor Metzger & Wynne in San Diego, was sitting in her car in the parking lot of an imaging center, poring over the results of a scan. It used words like “right lobe tumor mass measurements” so it couldn’t be hers. It must’ve been given to her by mistake. Right?

That’s when her doctor phoned her. “He said, ‘Anna, get the ‘f’ to my office, and call your husband,’” Roppo says. “You have lung cancer.”

Sent for a chest X-ray because of a cough she couldn’t shake and a weird pain in her shoulder, Roppo received that terminal lung cancer diagnosis. Years later, she’s ready to talk about it.

“For so long I was hyperfocused on dealing with the diagnosis and treatment,” she says.  “As time has gone by, I have more space and confidence in sharing my story. To have a terminal diagnosis and eight years down the road be telling my story to give hope to others … that’s remarkable.”

Time, of course, was a luxury Roppo felt she didn’t have. “I remember in the early days of treatment, speaking with my oncologist and begging her, please, just get me to my daughter’s high school graduation,” Roppo says. “Now we joke that maybe we can make it to grandchildren.”             

For the first two years of treatment, Roppo underwent radiation and chemotherapy. In 2019, it seemed the cancer had been contained. She was eventually put on a daily oral medication, which kept the cancer at bay but wreaked havoc on her liver, leading to drug-induced autoimmune hepatitis.

In 2023, more bad news. Roppo went in for her regular scans, including a brain MRI, which found two small tumors. She underwent stereotactic radiation surgery. “Essentially they launched two very targeted radiation lasers at the tumors,” Roppo says. It worked on one tumor, but then necrotic brain tissue started to form around it; the necrosis spread, affecting her motor cortex, which caused her right leg to drag. She’s now completed infusion treatments to stop the spread.

“My brain works just fine, thank goodness,” she says. “I do have some challenges ahead of me, but nothing I worry about.”

Worrying didn’t help, she found. “I’ve done all the pity parties,” she says. “My husband and I sit together, we have the pity party, and then I get angry. I’m in the angry stage right now—about the fact that I have to rehab my right leg, for crying out loud, one insult after the other. I stay angry at the cancer, and then I do what’s necessary to confront the challenge. That’s how I keep going.”

Throughout her journey, she didn’t take a single day of leave from the firm—although she did scale back her practice. But in 2021 she got a call from a handful of shareholders who told her they wanted her to be the firm’s next managing partner. “I said, ‘Um, are you sure? Don’t you know my story?’ And he said, ‘Yes. And?’ So I said, ‘Let’s go.’ We haven’t looked back since.”

You don’t go through something of this scale without it changing you. “My identity was fueled by the idea that I had to run the treadmill of life at full force, constantly,” she says. “The profession, being supermom, putting money away, worrying about a 401k and the kids’ education and doing all those things people do. It made me stop abruptly and say, ‘Hold up. I’m not going to have enough time. I’ve got to reorient and reset my priorities.’”

Professionally, those priorities include helping her clients see the bigger picture. “Clients and lawyers can get caught up in the emotion of the case, and it’s not always a bad thing,” she says. “But I can now see a much clearer perspective and I’m able to say, ‘Alright, let’s back away. Let’s think about the economics and the business of this as opposed to the emotion and principle that is driving you.’ This is a much easier discussion to have.”

Seeing the bigger picture is a priority in her personal life as well. “There are so many things I simply don’t care about anymore—like how much I weigh or how much exercise I’m doing,” she says. “At the worst times, when you’re the sickest, when you’ve suffered every insult there is to suffer—you lose hair, your eyes sink into the back of your head, you don’t look like you used to … you look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh my God, who is this shell of a person?’—but I had to let all that go.”

If there’s letting go, there’s also letting in. “I enjoy food now more than ever,” Roppo says. “During chemotherapy, some of those drugs are terrible, and you lose your ability to taste, you lose the desire to put food in your mouth. I don’t think of the calories or the fat content anymore. I just let it go and wait for the joy.”