| Charlotte Deleste Anchored in love of family By Heidi M. Pascual |
| A great fan of her mother, Charlotte described her as "strong, classy, supportive, smart, generous, a positive thinker, and an ideal woman" who is "the brains behind" her dad's business operations, and the caregiver of her sister who has Down Syndrome. "My mom learned to make something out of nothing. She has made sacrifices in her life's path so that her family could have a quality life," Charlotte said, visibly grateful to her mother. "She taught me what was truly important in life: love and happiness. When I told her I was going to be rich and famous one day, she said, 'You don't want that. Money and fame won't buy happiness, and that is what's most important. You just have to be happy.' Back then I thought that was kind of weird. But now, I couldn't agree more. I am certainly not rich and I wouldn't call myself famous. But you know what? I'm very happy." Charlotte's mom has been such a positive influence in her life. "I see how she has touched others," Charlotte recalled, enumerating instances when her mom helped other people. "Since Mom fought and won her battle with breast cancer, she has been the go-to person among her friends who've been diagnosed with some form of cancer. She's been their personal driver, cheerleader, care taker. She's listened to their darkest fears, cried, prayed, hoped with them. She's a one-woman support system." Like a strong foundation, her mom is her sister's support. "My sister will be 28 years old this July and is completely dependent on my family. Mom brings her to school at 9 a.m. and picks her up at 3 p.m. Like most moms, she does what she can in between." Charlotte wanted to be a dancer, she said, but her parents quashed that ambition. "Like any other Filipino girl, you take piano lessons, ballet/dance lessons, and I started when I was 3 on both, and I loved it," she said. "At Marquette, I knew I needed to do something that has to do with people. My parents were always helping people, so I knew I had to do something like that. A friend suggested that I try communications." Charlotte did, and the rest was history. Her career started through internships at a local station in St. Louis, then with Hollywood's Entertainment Tonight, a glamorous, glittering experience for a young Midwestern girl in jeans and t-shirts. Her wish came true. She has been doing something that has to do with people or the public since then. Charlotte and her husband Ron moved to Madison from Pennsylvania in 2003 in order to be closer to her family in St. Louis. "My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer right after we got married in December 2001, and it was really hard to be far away from her," Charlotte recalled. "She had a double mastectomy. It was pretty bad. She had three surgeries in 41 days. That was a 'wake up call' I guess ... we decided to move closer to home. I also wanted to be with my sister often." Part of the decision was the couple's desire to start having their own family. "I never grew up with my grandparents around because they were in the Philippines," she lamented. "And in my perfect world, my child will know his grandparents, and not to see them three times and that's it, or just communicate by letters or phone. Ron ended up getting a job at Channel 27 as executive producer, so we came here and I ended up getting a job doing marketing at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum." While her job at the museum was totally different from her world outside of television, it actually was a blessing when she became pregnant with Giovanni, because it was "regular" office work. The love of Charlotte and Ron's life was born on October 10, 2005. Giovanni Two months after Giovanni's birth, Charlotte noticed that her baby would wake up in the middle of the night, sounding like he was having a nightmare. "He'll cry a little bit for 10 seconds and then go back to sleep," she narrated. "So we looked up on the Internet and we found ... 'night terrors.' Then he kept having them, and then in April while I was down with him here playing, he had one of those episodes, wide awake, in front of Ron. Gio just looked frightened and lost, like he doesn't know where he is. It's not your typical seizures where you're convulsing." Charlotte started videotaping Giovanni as he slept, spending many hours and sleepless nights to capture such moments, which she later showed to his pediatrician. "Those are not night terrors; those are seizures,'" the doctor reportedly said. Giovanni's electroencephalogram (EEG) revealed an abnormal brain activity that led to a series of neurological tests, including an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). "They found a cyst right at his brain stem pushing against the brain stem," Charlotte said with a pained look. "It was pushing out lobes and other areas of the brain." Initially, the neurosurgeon didn't suggest brain surgery, but eventually, the doctors came to the conclusion that medicine was not controlling Giovanni's seizures. "By this time, he was having anywhere from 10 to 15 seizures a day ... and he was on two different medications, but they were not working. So Ron and I just really struggled with trying to decide should we have surgery or not?" When Giovanni's doctors recommended removing the "most obvious thing in the equation," Charlotte prayed like she had never prayed before. "I prayed to God every single night since May 10 for a miracle," she said. "I would just cry 'God, please don't take him away from me!' The surgery was low risk, 2-3% risk, but those risks were very acute: they were death, paralysis, brain damage, [irregular] eye movements, coma. It could affect anything, but we decided we want to give Gio every chance possible. Our doctor said, 'If he's 10 years old and had a surgery and came out half of the body paralyzed, he won't recover' but if he does now, he will.' So it looked better to have it when he was a baby because babies are so resilient; they can bounce back from things." Gio's brain surgery was performed at UW Hospital on August 29 last year, one-and-a-half months short of his first birthday. It was truly a most trying moment in Charlotte's life. "We had different priests blessing him while many people around the world e-mailed [saying they] pray for our son," Charlotte recalled. "We were in the hospital for about a week-and-a-half the first time, and then when we came home, he just wasn't doing well; he was throwing up all the time, so we went to the ER, but they couldn't find anything." The following week when Gio's doctor saw him, Gio was checked into the hospital right away. Obviously something was wrong. "He had fluid on the brain, so they had to go back in and put a drain in there," Charlotte shook her head as she spoke. "At that point, that's when I lost it at the hospital. You don't want to ask how much more can I take, because you really can't take a lot more, and you don't want out either." With Giovanni on her lap, Charlotte lovingly ran her fingers on Gio's hair. "Now he's on one medication and his seizures are down to one a day," she said. "He's still having them. The cyst apparently was applying pressure to two parts of the brain that are most seizure-sensitive. But now, he's down to really one a day, sometimes none, and we dance for joy when it's a zero day. We have to keep a log every day when he has them, how long they last, what he was doing, what he looks like when he's having them, because we have to find any pattern." Charlotte has one dream today and it's for her son to outgrow this health problem. "We're hoping that we can take him off the medicines eventually," she said. "Because if the seizures become increased, then there's a chance he might have to undergo two more brain surgeries. It was very, very hard. We waited a long time to have a child. I had two miscarriages before I had him." The next time you see Charlotte's youthful, smiling, and pretty face on WISC-TV giving us the top news of the day, you're looking at a strong woman who struggles every day to make motherhood the most wonderful career behind the camera. Charlotte's gems of thought * People would say, 'Oh you're on TV that's so great!" I'd say, 'It's just a job. I just happen to be on TV telling you the news. I don't save lives. I don't do brain surgeries. I'm not trying to find a cure for cancer. It's just a job, and I'm fortunate to be doing something that I love. * My piano teacher, Mrs. Dinyer, whom I've known since 1980 taught me to live my life like music. It's OK to feel, it's OK to be expressive, there are times to be loud and times to be quiet. More importantly, she taught me to always be myself, even if it meant not being like everyone else. * I am a Filipino, but nobody would ever guess that. People look at me and they think "Oh, Italian," or "Oh, Hawaiian." I got my nose from the Spanish side of my mom, and I have fair skin, but that doesn't change the fact that I am a Filipino. I am very proud of my heritage and my background. * I never knew what was different about me when it came to skin color until I was seven years old. I had a friend, Debbie, and we called each other all the time. Whenever I would call, her grandmother, who lived with them, would never say my name. She would say, "Debbie, that colored girl is on the phone." And I didn't know what that meant. Eventually I asked Debbie, and she said "Oh, because you're not White." 'What do you mean I'm not white? I have fair skin.' She said "Your skin color is different." We held our arms up to each other, and I'm like, "I'm not that much different from you!" I think it's the most ridiculous thing. Some people are just ignorant, they just don't know. * From what I know of history, it appears women have it much easier now in American society than 100 years ago. We have many more opportunities. But, there are still steps to be taken in some places for total equality. For American women, I don't think we are given just as much of a chance to succeed as men, but I think it's close. In my field, women have come a long way, and, in many respects, have surpassed men. There are more women working in the communication field now than men -- especially on-air journalists. As visual as we are, I can only feel that young girls see that and realize that they too can do it as well. I also believe that minority women have a better chance of doing well in the communication field as more minority groups empower themselves and grow. * If I have been discriminated against, it was because I'm a woman, not because I'm a Filipino. In one of my jobs, it was when the war in Iraq had begun. We did all of our war news on a different venue in the studio which they call the "war desk." It was my co-anchor, a man, who was always doing the war desk. I asked the management, "Why can't I do the war desk?" I don't remember exactly ... but they basically said, "War ... you think men." I was so mad about that, but I thought, "I'm gonna choose my battles and this is not what I'm gonna fight. OK, that's fine, you read the bad news." |
| (Above) Ron, Gio, and Charlotte on Easter 2006; (below) A family photo from Giovanni's baptism on November 2005 (First row, l-r) Michelle, Gio, Charlotte; (2nd row, l-r) Aunt Daisy, Tita Cering Deleste, Charlotte's mom; (3rd row, l-r) Great Uncle Felino Deleste, Charlotte's dad, and husband Ron |