My Cancer Story: Federal Research helped save my life
This story was written for Patient Action for Cancer Research by PACR Alliance Board Member, Anne Davis Burns.
I have never met Dr. Marc Lippman, but he saved my life.
Just before Christmas in 2007, I found a lump in my breast while showering. I knew that it hadn’t been there before, but I was not very concerned because I had just had a clear mammogram four months prior. I said nothing to my husband or my family because I didn’t want to thrust worry for anyone into the holiday season. But I made an appointment with my primary care physician for just after the holidays.
In the first week of January, my primary care physician checked it out and sent me immediately for an ultrasound. I kept telling myself that, in light of my recent clear mammogram, this was probably just a mistake. But when the radiologist announced that he would need to do a biopsy on the spot, I was stunned. When he called me the next day at my office to tell me that I had cancer, I was immediately concerned about how this news would affect my husband, my mother, my children and my siblings, with whom I am very close. Later, when I talked to my PCP, she told me that from reading the biopsy report she knew that I had a “high-grade” cancer. I didn’t know what that really meant, but I deduced from her urgent tone that it wasn’t good.
I told my boss that I would need to take some time off for treatment but that I would probably be back within a few weeks. Little did I know what was ahead. I did not return for six months. A mastectomy followed by numerous surgeries due to complications from failing to heal, infections, chemotherapy, all took much longer than expected. I returned to my office the first day I started radiation treatments and for weeks afterwards stopped by the hospital on my way home from work for radiation.
Cancer took a physical toll on me that continues to this day, as I experience daily pain and neuropathy. It also took an emotional toll on my children, who were at the fraught ages of 13 and 15 at the time, my husband, and me.
Despite all of this, I was very lucky. My cancer was estrogen receptor-positive (ER+). I learned that this was one of the more treatable types of breast cancer in terms of the number of medical therapies that were available. Only years later did I discover the name of Dr. Marc Lippman, who had made those therapies possible through his breast cancer research way back in 1975. Dr. Lippman discovered that the hormone estrogen played a role in breast cancer development and the rapid growth of breast cancer cells, especially in my type of cancer. That discovery was made possible through sustained investment in cancer research, much of it supported by taxpayers through the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. In fact, at the time of his discovery, Dr. Lippman led the medical breast cancer section of the medicine branch at NCI. Learning about him gave me a deep sense of the human connection between publicly funded cancer research, the researchers who spend years on work that benefits millions of people unknown to them, and the patient.
Building on this groundbreaking discovery, cancer researchers over the years were able to develop many of the drugs used to block estrogen or its production that are routinely used to treat estrogen positive breast cancer today—advances built step by step through decades of federally supported research and clinical trials.
I received some of those lifesaving drugs as part of my treatments and am convinced that federally supported research like Dr. Lippman’s is the reason I am still walking around 18 years after my diagnosis with an aggressive cancer.
The amount of life I have lived in these past 18 years since I survived cancer cannot be quantified. I was able to be here as a partner for my husband as we raised our two children, to assist my mother and my husband’s parents as they grew old and to be with them as they passed away. I have been able to dance at my children’s weddings, travel to Ireland with my mother and siblings, and check off a bucket list trip to Greece with my husband to celebrate 35 years of marriage. I was able to help my siblings, my neighbors and friends who rely on me. I have mentored newly diagnosed breast cancer warriors and helped start a nonprofit to raise money for breast cancer research and for services for women in the local area currently fighting the disease.
Because I was so grateful to receive the benefits of cancer research, I volunteered for a three-year clinical trial testing a drug that might prevent a recurrence of breast cancer. I saw it as a chance to pay forward a contribution to cancer research that gave me back my life. These trials, often supported through the same federal research system that made my treatment possible, are how today’s patients help create tomorrow’s cures.
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