Triumphs & Trials of the District Attorney

Nola Foulston has a tough-as-nails reputation to uphold. Still, there’s another side to the district attorney that few see.

Last night, Nola Foulston was at the scene of a homicide until 1:30 a.m. The phone rang late in the evening, after she’d gone to bed, and she immediately responded. After 19 years as district attorney, she’s grown used to such late-night escapades. Now she sits in her office, on the second floor of the Sedgwick County Courthouse, and shuffles through stacks of paper on her desk between meetings with staff.

She moves purposely, zebra-striped glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, magnolia-shaped earrings swinging back and forth as she turns from the papers to her computer screen. The outspoken 56-year-old district attorney wears a navy blue and white striped blouse with a matching blue pullover and a necklace with a cross on it. Her office is a collection of memories from a lifetime of law. There’s a gavel, a Louisville Slugger, black and white photos of her son, Andrew, dressed as a judge at an early age, more family photos, a signed cartoon drawn by Wichita Eagle cartoonist Richard Crowson, an array of tokens from her travels around the world.

Suddenly, a woman sticks her head in the door. “Another homicide: two males—one is dead, the other is in critical condition at Via Christi. Oh, and the man shot the dog.” Foulston shakes her head. “This is every day,” she says. “You think you’ve seen it all and you see something new.”

Granted, Foulston has seen more than most district attorneys. She’s dealt with the BTK killer, the Carr brothers and other high-profile, controversial cases. After nearly two decades, she runs a government office that consists of more than 110 employees (50 of whom are attorneys) like a well-oiled machine. “I actually find less stress in this environment because it’s controlled,” she says. “Stress is when things aren’t in control.”

Foulston knows real stress. Stress is having unexplained painful ailments for years. Stress is when dozens of doctors fail to offer a diagnosis. Stress is going three decades before discovering you have multiple sclerosis at the age of 48.

A  PERSONAL  TRIAL

“My head feels like a balloon today,” says Foulston. “It’s like there’s this tight band wrapped around the sides of my head, as if I’m wearing earmuffs.”

Foulston decides to get some fresh air. She invites Georgia Cole, her spokeswoman and executive assistant, to accompany her. On the way out, the two pass a hallway lined with Ansel Adams photos, Foulston’s personal touch as an avid photographer. They walk down a flight of stairs with rails along the sides that Foulston had installed to help her when she’s feeling weak.

Once outside, on the sidewalk that runs along Elm Street, she sits on a bench, her exhaustion slightly more noticeable. Foulston begins listing her occasional symptoms: numbness in her hands and arms, a large lump in her throat, blurred vision, full-body arthritis, bouts with the flu that take twice as long to recover as they should. She’s broken her nose by passing out and falling face-first on the cement. Her short-term memory occasionally fails her, yet she can recite the names of 12th-century royalty from the book she’s reading, Four Queens, with no trouble. She works long hours, going nonstop from one meeting to the next, to the point that her staff has to tell her to stop and rest. “My staff can read me like a medical book,” she says.

Despite her energetic personality and relentless ambition, she admits, “You have to be realistic. You’re falling apart day by day—you’re not bulletproof. But if it ever comes to a point where I can’t do the job, then I won’t do it. When I don’t feel I’m effective, I’ll walk away.”

That being said, Foulston says she plans to run again next year.

THE  ROAD  TO  DIAGNOSIS

It’s been a long road for the five-term D.A., a woman who moved to Kansas from New York. Her grandparents immigrated to America from southern Italy in the early 1900s. She keeps black and white photos of them on her office wall. Her father, Dominick “Teddy” Tedesco, was a school administrator and Renaissance man who enjoyed opera, the arts and photography—a hobby that rubbed off on his daughter. Foulston’s mother was a professional dance performance artist and writer for Reader’s Digest. Foulston was the youngest of three children, growing up in upstate New York. She recalls a “Currier and Ives-like childhood,” with days spent biking, swimming and playing hockey.

When it came time to decide on a college, Foulston—then Nola Tedesco—chose her father’s alma mater, Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. She originally planned to be a drama teacher, but she changed her mind while working for the Commission on Civil Rights in Kansas, where she saw how law could improve people’s lives. The day Foulston started law school at Washburn University School of Law—August 19, 1974—was the day her father died. Despite the circumstances and being one of only 10 women in a class of 200, she thrived in law school. “I absolutely loved it,” she says. “I think it was my perfect choice.”

She graduated in 1976 and began her law career as an assistant district attorney in Sedgwick County, in the same office she now runs. Five years later, she joined Foulston, Siefkin, Powers and Eberhardt. It was during that time that she met her husband, Steve Foulston, another attorney who, ironically, wasn’t a member of the firm (although his grandfather had co-founded it in the 1930s). The two got married in 1983 and later formed their own law firm, Foulston and Foulston, which specialized in mass tort litigation and medical malpractice. In 1988, Foulston took a significant pay cut to leave the private sector and serve as Sedgwick County’s district attorney. The rest of her professional life is public record, having prosecuted some of the biggest criminal cases in Wichita’s history and being a frequent subject of the local media. “I have to read the bad press about me,” she jokes. “It keeps me humble.”

Yet there was another part of her life that was rarely discussed. Since her twenties, Foulston suffered unexplainable, debilitating physical ailments. She experienced headaches, fatigue and paralysis. At times, especially after long vacations, she couldn’t even walk because her right side was so numb. When she got a cold or the flu, it lasted twice as long as her friends. She chronicled these painful bouts in a journal and consulted her Merck Manual, a medical guide that was a present from her uncle. By 26, she’d narrowed down her illness to lupus or multiple sclerosis. Doctors, on the other hand, ran a wide variety of tests, but the results always came out negative. Even a trip to the Mayo Clinic in the early ’80s proved unfruitful. Most physicians told her she was stressed or needed to get more exercise. “It was really hard because I’m fairly tenacious,” she says. “I’m sure everyone thought I was crazy because they couldn’t figure out what was wrong.” Not until May 1999 did doctors discover a series of lesions on her brain and diagnose her with multiple sclerosis. “It was actually a relief. I even brought the brainscan into the office to prove I have a decent-sized brain,” she says with a laugh.

DAILY DEALINGS 

Eight years later, living with MS has become part of Foulston’s daily routine. Before bed, she injects herself with Copaxone, a type of medicine that aids people with multiple sclerosis. Her medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, with a wide selection of pills for different symptoms. She has a handicap parking tag, but she rarely uses it. She’ll sometimes use a cane, which she jokingly refers to as “just a useful fashion accessory.” Her husband is her own motivational coach.

While Foulston deals with her disease, she helps other MS survivors. She often gets phone calls from complete strangers who ask for advice about the disease. She does her best to help them by sharing about her own experiences. She’s also very active with the MS Society, which awards her with the prestigious MS Hope Award on September 13, during the group’s annual Dinner of Champions.

Looking back, she says: “I’ve had some real highs and some real lows in my 56 years. But I’ve tried to do the best I could at everything. People might criticize me, but they haven’t walked in my high heels.”