Salon.com > Lab Rat

My “truly remarkable” cancer breakthrough

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000

I've spent my whole career trying to make some kind of a name for myself. But it turns out that if I am ever remembered for anything, it will likely be as a number.

My patient number is how I'm identified in the immunotherapy clinical trial I've been in since the fall of 2011. It protects my privacy as my doctors and researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering assess my results. And those results have been, in the words of American Society of Clinical Oncology president Dr. Sandra Swain, "very exciting." "Truly remarkable," even. Results with far-reaching implications not just for countless melanoma patients just like me, but, soon, for patients with a variety of other forms of cancer. It's a whole new era of treatment.

This is something I've known about – and lived firsthand -- for a while. But the first abstract from the report my doctor, Jedd Wolchok, will be presenting at the ASCO annual meeting starting May 31 was released Wednesday – and even in a cancer news week dominated by Angelina Jolie and prophylactic mastectomies, the findings still managed to make waves.

Confronting cancer webcast

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

My oncologist says that whoever came up with the phrase "the gift of cancer" has the worst taste in gifts she's ever heard of. But though it's not exactly a set of car keys under the seat, cancer has, for the past year and a half, been the gift I've been given. And from an initial malignant diagnosis of melanoma through surgery through a Stage 4 rediagnosis through a last-ditch, Phase 1 clinical trial to a recovery that has stunned the research community, I've shared this adventure with the readers of Salon. And along the way, you've given so much in return. You've told me your own experiences with illness, with the healthcare system, with grief and frustration, and with the ways a shattering experience -- either your own or that of someone you love -- can turn life around. Sometimes even for the better. So it was a unique privilege to get to talk to a few of you recently for a Salon webcast, and answer your questions on life here in Cancer Town. For those of you who couldn't make it live, videos of the full webcast are posted below.

The connections we find in unlikely circumstances are what get us through them. They're a gift. Thank you for it.

Now what? Life after cancer treatment

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Of all the possible outcomes one could have after a diagnosis of metastatic, Stage 4 cancer, I have had the best. Last month, my doctor told me the tumors in my lungs and under the flesh of my back -- after months of treatment in an experimental, Phase I clinical trial -- had disappeared. And now, having endured surgeries and side effects and weekly monitoring, I can, with my last regular treatment mere weeks away, begin preparing for the rest of my life. Yet when my friends ask what we're doing to celebrate, when they high-five me and ask, hopefully, "So now it's over, right?" I don't know what to tell them. I don't know how to explain why I don't feel yet like partying.

I'd thought I would. Months ago, when the treatment was just starting and my fate was uncertain, life without a flurry of infusions and blood work seemed unimaginable. That was around the time my friend, the writer Anne Stockwell, wrote to say that she was planning a Web community called WellAgain. "We cancer cases get amazing and heroic care during treatment," she wrote, "but after is when the emotional hammer hits, and somehow after is exactly when we find ourselves alone again." The name, she explained, "refers to the fact that cancer never gives you the certainty that you're well again. So you have to decide what well again is for you."

“I have your results”

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:00:00 +0000

I had just settled into a chair for my regular Tuesday night cancer support group when I got the call. An unfamiliar number. A split second of wondering whether or not to answer. And then my doctor, calling from his own phone to say, "I have your results."

People with metastatic, Stage 4 melanoma rarely get happy endings. They usually just get endings. The odds of surviving five years once the cancer has spread into your lungs and bloodstream are generally ballparked at around 10 percent. So when I entered a Phase I immunotherapy clinical trial in October, I knew the whole enterprise had the pungent aroma of Last Ditch. My doctors said brightly that my relative youth and good health made me "an ideal candidate." They said that the drug combination I'd be on – the newly approved Ipilimumab and the experimental, sexily named MDX-1106 – were highly "promising." And because it was a trial, Bristol-Myers Squibb would essentially foot the bill. They had also just told me that the malignant cancer I had surgery for in 2010 had broken off; there was now a tumor in my lung and another one under the flesh of my back. In the stark absence of other options, I signed a 27-page consent form alerting me to potential side effects from diarrhea to hepatitis and even death. And with that, I started on a protocol that I hoped wouldn't kill me before the cancer did.