
How the Patient Perspective Improved My Cancer Research and Changed My Career Path
The first time I heard the words “you have cancer,” I was sitting in the doctor’s office with my best friend Katie. We were both 28 years old. Katie had a lump removed from her breast the Monday before Thanksgiving and I was home in New Jersey a few days ...

Running: Fuel for My Body and Soul After Cancer
Being diagnosed with cancer stinks. It is a traumatic experience that will ripple through your life for years to come. For me it was no different. I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer at 31 and underwent treatment for a year, which included high doses of steroids. After almost two years ...

Moving Through and Beyond Stage IV Colorectal Cancer
By Stacy Hurt, MHA, MBA. “But I’m an athlete and a non-smoker. I do everything right!” Those were my first words to the gastroenterologist who told me that the 11cm tumor in my rectum was “most likely cancer.” You would’ve thought I’d learned the whole “life isn’t fair” lesson when ...

Cancer at 30: Reflections on Post-Traumatic Growth
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging.” —Marcus Aurelius | In December of 2015, I was in the prime of my life. I was thirty years old, recently married, and had just launched a new business. Like ...

Finding Healing Hope – By Wendy S. Harpham, MD
Let’s discuss “hope.” After a cancer diagnosis, few topics are mentioned more…and discussed less. That’s a problem because what you hope for may mean the difference between enjoying life or feeling miserable. Maybe even between life and death. So how do you find hope? Not just any hope, but healing ...

Diagnosed with Cancer? Consider Living Life Like a Professional Cyclist
Guest Post by Mark Corroto — I recommend those diagnosed with cancer consider living life as if they are a professional cyclist. Ok, not racing 100 miles and climbing 10,000 feet of elevation, but attending to their minds and bodies as if preparing for the Amgen Tour of California. Cyclists ...

Introducing PatientTrueTalk.com – A Way for Advocates to Directly Help the Newly Diagnosed
Patient True Talk is the only patient-to-patient registry where patients and/or their caregivers can create profiles with as much information as they feel comfortable sharing, and find matching profiles based on algorithms created by some of the country’s top clinical oncologists. Patients/caregivers can also search along their diagnosis/treatment parameters, refining ...

A Medical School Perspective: Beyond the Science, We Must Learn to Communicate with Patients
By Nainika Nanda, MD — Survivorship. What does this mean? Oncology highlights patients currently battling cancer. However, survivorship encompasses a longer timeline. Cancer requires lifelong care, which is achieved through proper doctor-patient communication. In fact, this relationship is a keystone of medicine. Unfortunately, it can lose focus in the sea ...

Patient Assistance Programs: Do They Help or Hurt?
By Rishi Sachdev and Yousuf Zafar, MD — New cancer drugs have improved prognoses for patients, but that improvement in effectiveness has come at a steep cost. The price tag of new anticancer drugs has been increasing at a significant pace, with the latest—Kymriah by Novartis—priced at $475,000 per treatment ...

Seeing the Bigger Picture of Survival Through Patient Advocacy
As patient advocates (as in most other things in life), it seems the more we learn, the more see what we don’t know. Whether we’re involved in promoting a patient-centered approach to research, direct care, survivorship, policy change or education, there’s a daily twist and update for us to wrap ...