Eight years after getting his diagnosis, the 47-year-old TV journalist is still walking — most days without a cane. He suffers from balance problems, weakness and back pain, but he's still the anchor of the popular cable business show Your World with Neil Cavuto. And he manages to make it all seem easy despite the fact that on a bad day, he'll have a sudden loss of vision that makes reading the teleprompter impossible.
"The first time it happened, his staff freaked out," his wife, Mary Cavuto, says. But now Cavuto simply prepares for any sudden loss of vision by going over and over the script so that he's got it down cold.
"He knows the issues inside and out," says a producer at Fox News, Gresham Striegel. Striegel say that Cavuto drives himself and others to perform at a high level.
Cavuto leaves his Chester, N.J., home at 4:30 a.m. every day to get to the studio in Manhattan about an hour later. Most days that means he can get to the gym for a quick workout. While he's on the treadmill, Cavuto starts to prepare for his day by boning up on the day's business news.
At 8, he's firing questions at staffers in a meeting to plan the upcoming show. As a Fox vice president, Cavuto also is responsible for four other business shows, so the rest of the day is taken up with research, meetings and phone calls to try to get influential guests to appear on his show.
At 3 p.m., Cavuto is in the studio rehearsing the script. He's on the air an hour later. To hear him sparring with experts, you'd never know that Cavuto has an illness that causes fatigue. "I do get tired," he admits.
Sometime after 5, Cavuto heads back to Chester and his family, including two young boys he and his wife adopted a year ago.
"If you have MS, it's hard to be an adoptive parent," Cavuto said in a speech he gave last month to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society meeting in Atlanta. He and his wife had to answer a lot of questions about MS in addition to going through the usual red tape associated with adoption, he says.
"But they're great kids," he says about the boys: Bradley, age 3, and Jeremy, age 4. Their daughter Tara, who is 20, is attending college.
Cavuto manages to make it all seem easy, despite the fact that he's dealing with the unpredictable symptoms of MS. Experts such as Richert say the symptoms can vary from day to day. For Cavuto, that means some days he can walk fairly normally. Other days he has to use a cane to maintain his balance. And a few times a year, he has had flare-ups so bad that he has landed in the hospital.
"This disease is like a ride on a roller coaster," Mary Cavuto says. "You never know how the symptoms are going to play out."
But Cavuto knows that his situation could be worse: He developed MS at a time when doctors have several drugs to treat the disease. He takes Avonex, one of five drugs thought to reduce flare-ups and slow the progression of the disease.
And while there is no cure now, scientific research will almost certainly offer advanced treatments in the near future, Richert says. The National MS Society has just given four MS centers $15.6 million to develop drugs aimed at repairing some of the damage done to the central nervous system.
The disease has made Cavuto more appreciative of life's simple pleasures, like taking his two boys out trick-or-treating for the first time this fall. He says he puts a much higher priority on spending time with his family. "I know what it is like to go through some really bad stuff," he says. "So I focus now on what really matters."
People say he's crazy, he says, "but I am grateful for having this disease."
