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Saying goodbye to Leigh Pate, lobular legend

25 Jul

Leigh and I met through writing, not cancer. We both had the same breast cancer – invasive lobular – but we got together initially because she wanted to chat about how to market some of the essays she was writing about her travels. I was a freelancing then and coaching writers a little. So Leigh got in touch. The cancer thing was just a funny coincidence.

Leigh was bright without trying to outshine anybody. Smart without being a show-off. That first time we met, I learned Leigh had done a “little” cycling, a “bit” of traveling; a “smidge” of political work back in Washington D.C.  She didn’t really go into her accomplishments much; Leigh was humble. She casually mentioned bicycling alone through India at one point in the conversation. Later, I learned she broke her collar bone during the trip and just kept pedaling through the pain. That was sort of Leigh’s way.

As we chatted that first evening at the Triple Door, Leigh shared cocktail trivia (her favorite was called The Last Word and was served at her memorial) and the two of us went through our respective cancer histories. Who’d had what done; what kind of collateral damage was left behind. With cancer treatment, there is always damage. Leigh had lymphedema, a side effect of her breast cancer surgery and already knew a ton about it. She knew you had to tackle it immediately; you had to get a compression sleeve and a gauntlet, a glove. She was already wearing both, completely on top of the issue mere months out of treatment.

Later, Leigh pretty much threw down the gauntlet when it came to lobular breast cancer.

Our subtype was supposedly “rare,” she told me that night, yet lobular BCs make up 10 to 15% of all breast cancers. Leigh had already dug into the stats and found them wanting. She told me Google had to correct her when she tried to look up her “globular” breast cancer. She’d never heard of it; I’d never heard of it. None of the other lobular patients Leigh had already connected with had heard of it.

Despite all those awareness campaign and news articles and research studies over the years, it was Leigh who recognized there was a huge gap in knowledge and education regarding lobular BC (and lymphedema); she identified a gaping hole where scientific research on this subtype needed to be. She was already amassing information in her calm, clear-eyed and absolutely fearless way.

Leigh and I hit it off that night. As much as I loathe cancer’s war metaphors, it felt like we were in the same trench. We were both single and straight; neither of us had kids – that we knew of, anyway (sorry, old joke). We both lived alone. And of course there was the cancer thing. Little by little, Leigh and I became friends and eventually partners in the fight against the crime of cancer.

Leigh was the most humble person I’ve ever met. And now that she’s gone … How horrible, how bitterly painful it is to write those words …  And now that she’s gone, I see clearly that she was even more accomplished, more modest, more unpretentious and generous than I ever realized. Since her death a month ago, I’ve been reading and listening to tributes from her many friends, learning more and more of her incredible accomplishments – the awards and accolades; the spectacular summits and cycling trips; the political campaigns and come-from-behind victories.

Later, there would be scientific meetings and white papers and a nonprofit, the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance, a sustained collaboration of ILC patients, clinicians and researchers that Leigh basically conjured up out of thin air. There were many others who helped – Dr. Steffi Oesterreich, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a slew of patient advocates and scientists. But Leigh was the visionary, the dreamer with the calm, at times even calculating, patience and diplomacy to – I don’t know – move a mountain.

Or something equally difficult: get cancer researchers to listen to cancer patients. Leigh not only got them to listen. She inspired them to switch gears, to lean into lobular. As one of the scientists who attended her memorial said, “Leigh Pate changed my life.”

Leigh changed many lives. She saved lives.

Cancer patients are inherently selfish. We have to be to stay alive. We have to focus on our treatments, our side effects, our pain, our complications, our worries and fears. As a cancer patient, you continually have to advocate for yourself. And Leigh advocated for herself. But Leigh was not selfish. She advocated for others, always. Individually and at a larger societal level. Sometimes, she even advocated for others when she herself was in pain, was dealing with complications – an infection or a blood clot or one of the other unpleasant things she had to deal with at the end. Leigh took unsolicited phone calls from scared strangers who’d just been diagnosed; she patiently answered people’s questions and soothed their fears, never letting on to many what she was dealing with herself. Most people in the lobular breast cancer world didn’t even know she’d been diagnosed with a second primary and that it was aggressive and advanced from the get-go. She didn’t necessarily want them to know. She didn’t want to confuse the issue, muddy the waters: it wasn’t about her or her health, she would tell me, it was about getting the word out about lobular.

Leigh did all the things to get rid of that second primary cancer. She went through the surgeries, tried the chemos, even enrolled in a CAR-T immunotherapy trial, everything. But this particular cancer – Fallopian tube/ovarian, also understudied – was too much even for her, even as strong as she was. Leigh seemed to know this, but she kept moving forward anyway. Just keep pedaling, right? She lined up specialists to help her with the complications that arose from treatment even as she sent out encouragement to post-docs and promoted new findings in lobular research through social media. She continued to advocate for herself and for others to the very end. Her last tweets were about a lobular conference taking place in The Netherlands and how excited she was about the research and collaborations that would spring from it. Leigh was generous. And seemingly indefatigable.

And now she is gone. 

To say that Leigh Pate will be missed is practically a criminal understatement. Many will miss her, even people she’d never met will miss her. I miss her already. Her thoughtful guidance and sly wit, her big brain and her bigger heart. I miss her fairness, her sense of integrity, her ethics, her humility. Leigh never needed to take up all the oxygen in the room to satisfy her ego; she didn’t care about accolades, she cared about people. She always was ready to help and how she actually knew how to help. Leigh knew how to get shit done. And she got a lot done in her calm steadfast way.

So yes, I will miss those green glasses, that great smile. That inner strength and serenity. I will miss Leigh’s sense of humor, her sense of justice. Her fierce independence and fiercer loyalty. Her patience because I’m afraid I have none. I still can’t believe she’s gone. My only consolation is seeing the good she left behind. Feeling the love. Hearing those accolades, as much as Leigh would roll her eyes. My only solace is thinking (hoping, praying) she’s off on her greatest adventure yet, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling into a never-setting sun.

For those who want to continue her legacy: There have been at least three memorial funds set up in Leigh’s honor, including a BCRF (Breast Cancer Research Foundation) fund which will go toward lobular research. Here’s a link to that: https://give.bcrf.org/fundraiser/4014139

Memorial donations can also be directed to The Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance Leigh Pate Memorial Advocacy Fund, lobularbreastcancer.org, or mailed to LBCA, PO Box 200, White Horse Beach, MA 02381.

Finally, Leigh received a lot of support from The Clearity Foundation and requested that memorial contributions be directed to them at www.clearityfoundation.org.

Writing, cancer registries and breast cancer recurrence rates

17 Apr

Ever get a question that sticks with you, that you can’t shake, that you keep ruminating on until you finally get an answer? My niggling question came in via email in the summer of 2015. The person emailing had just read a story I’d written the year before, shortly after I started working at Fred Hutch as a science writer and cancer whisperer. It was called Living with Stage 4: The breast cancer no one understands and featured a couple of patient advocates / friends, Teri Pollastro, still living large, and Jody Schoger, sadly gone.

The question from my reader had to do with a statistic I’d used in this passage: “While treatable, metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is incurable, between 20 and 30 percent of women with early stage breast cancer go on to develop MBC.”

“Can you please tell me where you got the statistic of 20-30%?”

I wrote back the next day, explaining that I’d gotten the stat from 2013 Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance Landscape report (you can peruse it here). And pasted in the original paragraph from the report: The actual number of new cases of MBC diagnosed each year is unknown. This is because SEER* only records the 5% of newly diagnosed breast cancer patients who have de novo MBC. However, most patients with MBC were first diagnosed at earlier stages of breast cancer that then recurs, months to years later. An estimated 20% to 30% of early stage breast cancer patients will develop MBC sooner or later. The SEER registries do not capture this much larger percentage. As a result, the actual annual incidence of MBC remains unknown.* Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program

This was when I first started to clue into the whole SEER data gap issue. The lack of recurrence data was news to me at that point – I was still reeling from treatment, dealing with recon and bootstrapping my way into the world of science and academic cancer research. But it was NOT news to my correspondent, who wrote back to emphasize how nobody really knew the answer, whether it was 5% or 50%, because it simply wasn’t tracked. Naturally, I wanted to write about this. Like immediately. I even replied to the person at 2:15 in the morning on my birthday (!) to tell them as much.

Do I know how to party or what? 😉

You get the problem, though. How could the country’s oldest, most well-respected cancer registry – the premier statistical clearinghouse for cancer information here in the U.S. – not have something as basic as the answer to a question like, “Soooo, roughly how many of us saps with early stage cancer go on to get mets?”

Digging in, I found others were way ahead of me, as usual, particularly Katherine O’Brien and the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance who launched a petition in 2016 asking SEER to “Start Counting ALL People Living With Metastatic Breast Cancer.” Katherine was hip to this issue in 2009; I’m sure there are many others who’ve been trying to change it longer than that, including researchers and healthcare providers. My email buddy was one of these people. They wrote back once more, and as mentioned above, their question – a request, really – has stuck with me ever since.

“Bottom line is that nobody tracks the data. The NCI could very easily track it … They track so many little pieces of data … that this would be a piece of cake. If there is anything you can do to help force the NCI or someone else to track those who start out at earlier stages and progress to stage 4, you could be doing a great service.”

As a lowly science writer employed by an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer research center (an admittedly conflicted position), I can’t realistically “help force the NCI” or any federal agency do anything. But like any patient advocate, I can ask questions and have conversations and make connections and talk and tweet about cockamamie cancer issues like this; I can write stories and try to bring awareness to the issue. I can follow the story to see where it goes. And that’s what I’ve tried to do over the last few years.

And happily, I’m seeing change. Maybe even a sea change.

For instance, Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a Hutch biostatistician and modeler who uses SEER registry data to inform ACS and USPSTF screening guidelines, immediately put this on her Scientist Things To Do list. She applied for and got an NCI grant to create, validate and implement a “scalable, automated approach for identifying cancer recurrence.” Another NCI grant and a bit of biostatistical magic helped her and her collaborators pull out key numbers (see below) that give us a much clearer picture of how many early-stager BC patients develop mets. For a breakdown of the findings, check out this Komen Puget Sound FB Live from the 2018 NWMBC Conference. It’s a great panel featuring with Dr. Corrie Painter of the MBC Project and other living legends. Ruth presents her MBC stats about 27 minutes in. Read more on her data mining methods here.

BREAST CANCER RECURRENCE RATES

  • 20% progress in 20 years. 20% of people diagnosed w/ early-stage breast cancer (stage 1 to 3) will go on to develop metastatic disease within 20 years.
  • 17% progress in 15 years. 17% of early-stagers become metsters within 15 years.
  • 20%+ progress in 20+ years. Over a longer time period, the 20% figure will increase.
  • Under 15 years, “very variable.” Within 15 years, it depends on the patient’s age, stage, hormone receptor status, etc.

Science is slow; everything takes years. And sometimes reporting is like that, too. But finally, here are some solid scientific numbers on metastatic breast cancer recurrence. It’s not 5%. It’s not 50%. It’s like 20-30%. It needs to be a 0%, of course, but now at least we know.

And that’s just the start. I was finally able to write that SEER story and am happy to report the NCI is currently working to improve the registry. Thanks to a score of data scientists and biostatisticians and oncologists and registrars and patient advocates and others, they’re finally trying to connect those “many little pieces of data” my email buddy mentioned all those years ago.

This is a long post, and cheers to you if you’re still reading. I guess I just I wanted to share the backstory on this story because it’s not just about hard to capture data. It’s not just about niggling questions or intellectual curiosity. It’s about the fact that not having this information, not even making an effort to collect this information, has left metastatic patients feeling uncounted, unheard, unseen, uncared for. And that’s pretty awful. Year after year, I’ve seen the tweets and posts from the newly diagnosed and those fresh to advocacy as they learn the NCI doesn’t track metastatic recurrence. They’re shocked, sad, outraged, full of disbelief. It’s like a slap in the face. How could they not count us?

I guess I’m writing this post for them. I want people in the cancer community to to know there’s been some progress. The NCI is actively working to bring the SEER registry and its infrastructure into the 21st century so we can finally address these burning cancer questions – and who knows, maybe stumble onto a therapeutic insight or three.

From my conversations with people at the NCI and with researchers like Dr. Steve Schwartz, who maintains the Hutch-based Puget Sound registry and is a cancer patient himself, it’s pretty obvious SEER and epidemiologists and others know this data’s been MIA for way too long. They know it has immense value; they want it as much as patients. Steve and Ruth even joined a couple of Zoom sessions with ACE (Advocates for Collaborative Education) and GRASP (Guiding Researchers and Advocates to Scientific Partnerships) to talk about registry data and field questions about the data gaps.

It’s a massive undertaking and it’s not going to happen overnight, but I’m grateful there is progress to report. I’m grateful that mets patients are being seen and heard and at long last counted. And I can’t wait to see how it all shakes out, because, of course, I’ll keep following the story. I’m kind of annoying like that.

Hope this piece offers you a little hope, especially if you happen to be a certain email correspondent of August 2015. As always, thanks for the read. Much love to all on this sunny April afternoon.

What’s a cancer registry? These large national databases track cancer trends, spotlight health disparities and improve patient care; new linkages allow for even more.

LINK: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/03/cancer-registry.html

Cancer, COVID-19, science and learning to trust

4 Apr


Photo courtesy of Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service

I’ve been too busy writing lately so I haven’t had much time to write. Does that make sense?

Here’s the deal (as our fabulous new President would say – and what a blessing to be able to say that right?), I’ve been working on a novel. Like for the past two years and then some. Through all of 2019 and the ankle break that kept me stuck inside for nearly five months. Through all of 2020 and this pandemic, which has kept us all stuck inside and away from each other and life’s many wonderful distractions and is still, I’m sad to say, not over by a long shot.

And here’s the thing. I just finished it, the book. Title is #IMPATIENT. It’s a dark romp about cancer and other stuff. Like crime and friendship and the whole cancer industrial complex. It’s in the hands of a few trusted readers at the moment. As soon as they’ve found, and I’ve fixed, all the plot holes and bad science and insipid dialogue, it’ll be off to the agent. I hope.

And then I’ll need to figure out what to work on next — in the realm of fiction, anyway.

In the realm of nonfiction, there’s the all too real world of cancer and COVID-19, both of which I write about for my job-job at Fred Hutch. For the record, I didn’t come to science or the field of science writing intentionally. I was a writer, sure, but science wasn’t my subject. I sort of stumbled into it after being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. I wanted to learn more about how cancer operated, how it all worked, so I could do my part to take it down.

With all the incredible sciencing going on with COVID-19 (along with the conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy), I decided to write about my complicated relationship with science and how I learned to trust it with my life after being diagnosed with cancer. Because I’d never felt healthier in my life than when they told me I had stage 3 lobular. Here’s some of it:

When somebody in a white coat tells you something you don’t want to hear, it’s easy to decide they’re full of beans — especially when nothing seems amiss.

I’d never felt healthier in my life than the day I was diagnosed with cancer (10 years ago this month). I had no fatigue, no lingering cough, no unexplained weight loss, not even a dang lump. All I had was a tiny tuck on one breast. But the doctors said they both had to go. They said I was stage 3 and needed chemo and radiation and then would have to take hormone-squelching drugs for the next 10 years.

Getting that news was like having a piano fall out of the sky and land on my head. You may recognize the feeling from last March when a concert grand called SARS-CoV-2 landed on all of ours. Part of me desperately wanted to ignore the surgeon, the scans, the histopathology, those microscopic images of my suffering tissue. That part wanted to run off to Mexico and bury my feet — and my head — in the sand.

Instead, I talked to friends and family and to other women who’d been down this road. Then I took a deep breath and trusted the science, even though I only understood a fraction of it. And I soon discovered cancer treatment was much less awful than I’d anticipated. Top-notch anti-emetics meant zero nausea; problematic low white cell counts were boosted with a belly shot of Neulasta (and no, not the kind you did in college). My regular jogs, which I thought of as therapy, actually were, according to the epidemiological studies I was now reading on the reg.

I was swayed. Science was something I needed to stay alive. 

FULL LINK: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/02/learning-to-trust-science-with-your-life.html

Here’s the whole essay Learning to Trust Science with Your Life published a few weeks ago. Feel free to take a read. As always, take care and thanks for stopping by. I imagine I’ll have much more to share in days to come. 😉

Cancer patients and the COVID-19 vaccines

17 Jan
Everybody should get vaccinated – even cancer patients and chorus girls!

In my latest for Fred Hutch, the cancer/virus/disease research center where I work, I dig into some of the questions I’ve seen swirling around on Twitter and Facebook as to whether cancer patients should get one of the two new “double-whammy” vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

Short answer: yes and as soon as possible (with a couple of caveats).

Definitely talk to your oncologist about your immune system if you’re currently getting any kind of immunocompromising treatment, such as chemotherapy. (Anti-hormones, which many of us are on for years, don’t qualify as immunocompromising.) You’ll also probably want to get the shots timed so your immune system is at its strongest. People with active cancer (I take this to mean stage 4, newly Dx’d folx) and those in active treatment should be prioritized, per Hutch public health researcher / oncologist Dr. Gary Lyman, since the complications from COVID-19 can be a lot worse for these peeps.

And YES, you still have to mask up after getting vaccinated: we don’t yet know if vaccinated people can infect others or not. BUT we sure know a lot more than we did last year when this creepy zoonotic virus first raised its spiky crowned head. And just so you’re aware, 3 out of every 4 new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals.

If you really want to dig in to the COVID-19 vaccine and specifics about mRNA, transplant patients, etc., you can hear a lot more from infectious disease (ID) and cancer experts like Gary and Dr. Steve Pergam on this ASCO/IDSA webinar.

Let me know if you have questions and I’ll try to follow up with more resources. In the meantime, #MaskUp #KeepYourDistance and #JustKeepSwimming

Cancer patients and the COVID-19 vaccines

The initial batch of COVID-19 vaccines are now available in the U.S. following incredibly fast — “warp speed” — development and testing.

Not so incredibly, there’s a lot of confusion among cancer patients — as well as their oncologists and caregivers — as to whether the vaccine is a good idea or a bad idea for somebody dealing with cancer.

The two Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, each requiring two shots a few weeks apart, were more than 94% effective at keeping this new coronavirus in check in testing on thousands of volunteers in clinical trials. But only a handful of the clinical-trial participants were cancer patients.

Other COVID-19 vaccines are in development and will be available in the months ahead. Additional trials involving subpopulations (think children, pregnant women, people with health issues) are also in the works.  

But what do we do now that states are ramping up the vaccination efforts to eligible groups?

Patients with cancer are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 because of the immunocompromising nature of cancer treatments. On top of that, progressing cancer itself depletes the immune system and leaves patients susceptible to infection.

Does that mean cancer patients should be first in line for their shot — or last? If they’re in treatment, could a vaccine make them sicker? What about those with metastatic disease who are always in treatment — can they get it? And are survivors the same as the general public? 

Full story here: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/01/cancer-patients-covid19-vaccine-coronavirus.html

Cancer and the coronavirus: hard prep

3 May

COVID19 image double whammied blog

Ghecemy Lopez of Los Angeles, a two-time cancer survivor who now has immune issues. She dons plenty of PPE for her doctor’s visits. 

It’s pretty much been corona, corona, corona these last few months — even in Cancerland — and I don’t imagine that will change much moving forward.

States are starting to open up — Washington will get there eventually —and I pray everyone out there stays safe as we slowly creep forward with our masks and mad soap & water skillz and (hopefully) enough sense to stand far enough away from people that we don’t accidentally breathe in any virus particles they may be talking, sneezing, laughing, singing, coughing or farting our way.

Sadly, it looks like we’re going to be here a while. Yet another new normal.

Like everybody else, I’m hoping science can find or fast-track better treatments than remdesivir (the Tamiflu of COVID-19, just emergency approved by the FDA) and that other drug combo the orange guy in the White House keeps chatting up, along with sunlight and bleach, as a fabulous miracle cure.
FaceSlap
Like everybody else, I’m praying a vaccine isn’t too far off in the distance. First time I typed that, I wrote vacuum, by the way, which may tell you where my head is.

I used to blame that sort of thing on chemo brain; now I think it’s more quarantine brain. It’s Tuesday, right? June 32?

As soon as we started hunkering down in early March and I saw how freaked out people were about the epidemic — all the uncertainty, the life or death odds, the extra precautions we all had to take to stay safe, the lack of a cure — it struck me as weirdly familiar. So I wrote about it for Fred Hutch News Service.

 

For those who’ve been diagnosed with cancer, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic has felt a little, well, familiar. The frantic Googling and data-gathering. The denial and disbelief. The uncertainty and panicky behavior. Cancer patients have been there.

Same goes for all the handwashing and hypervigilance. People who’ve been through surgery or radiation or chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants or other immunocompromising treatments are routinely forced to hunker down at home, avoiding crowds and friends with colds, skipping weddings and air travel and ordering their groceries online.

As one Seattle survivor put it, “I’ve sheltered in place lots of times.”

Did your cancer diagnosis and treatment ‘prep’ you for the COVID-19 pandemic? Certainly feels that way to me, same for the enforced quarantine after my ankle break last August.

Will the losses we’ve endured as cancer patients — family, friends, fellow advocates gone to another invisible enemy — help us bear the inevitable COVID-19 deaths ahead? It’s tough stuff, but as with cancer, we all have to somehow keep powering through.

But right now, it’s all feeling pretty old.

I’m getting corona-cranky after two months of hiding out at home. I’m angry about the people who’ve died and who keep dying because of our country’s clown car response to a deadly pandemic. I’m getting homesick (ironically) for restaurants and yoga studios and my old boring cubicle at work.

So I’m going back to peruse a few of these lessons from cancer patients in the time of coronavirus. Feel free to join me. Or send along your own. I’m having way too many arguments with my cat (and the little snot keeps winning).

#StayHomeStayAlive
#JustKeepSwimming
#FUcancer #FUcovid19

Coronavirus: what cancer patients need to know

8 Mar

CORONAVIRUS INFOGRAPHIC2So now there’s a pandemic. And my workplace and our scientists are right in the thick of it. I interviewed a couple of friends and Fred Hutch experts: one in infectious disease (Dr. Steve Pergam) and one in public health, health policy, outcomes AND oncology (Dr. Gary Lyman) to find out who’s most at risk for contracting COVID19.

That’s the brand new coronavirus that apparently leapt from some type of animal to somebody in China and now the infection has spread from there to Italy, Japan, Iran, South Korea, Thailand, you name it and now Seattle, where I’ve lived my entire “adult” life.

As it turns out, we’re now the country’s COVID19 epicenter. Not really all that much better than our previous reputation as Serial Killer Central.

Anyway, these two devoted scientists shared great data on COVID19 and who it picks on the most. They also had some great tips on little things we can do to boost our immune system (get that sleep!) and keep this new beast at bay.

Here’s their advice for cancer patients (past and present) and other folks with underlying health conditions (think COPD, heart disease, diabetes, HIV).

Wash your hands and read on.

Coronavirus: what cancer patients need to know: Advice for cancer patients, survivors and caregivers on who’s most at risk for COVID-19 and what you can do to stay healthy


FULL LINK: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/03/coronavirus-what-cancer-patients-need-to-know.html

Spinning science: how to cut through overhyped health news and medical misinformation to get to the truth

16 Feb

spinning science

My science writing team at Fred Hutch put together this series of stories to help the public — and especially cancer patients — cut through all the harmful health misinformation and overhyped nonsense that’s out there these days.

Boy, could I have used this back in the day.

When I was first diagnosed, it was hard to figure out what to believe, there was so much back and forth. Mammograms save lives! Mammograms actually give you cancer! Wine is healthy! Wine will kill you!  What was I supposed to take away from that? I would always try to go to the source, but deciphering scientific papers wasn’t easy either, not once they descended into TILOA, The Indecipherable Land of Acronyms, a confusing place full of scientific doublespeak and mind-bending biostatistical models.

If that’s you, I’m hoping this series will help. There are six stories in all. Great explainers on many aspects of clinical and epidemiological research (the stuff most likely to hit the headlines and get skewed), including sample size, correlation and causation, absolute vs. relative risk (spoiler: it has nothing to do with your family), open science, types of studies. There’s even some baseball statistics. Naturally. The Hutch is the only cancer research center named for a baseball player.

Spinning Science Series: Read all about it!

Give it a read and please share with anyone who’s a little science curious around the  edges, like me. Here’s a short link to the whole shebang: fredhutch.org/spinning-science  As always, thanks for the read and #FUcancer!

I’m having a moment

21 Apr

TalkIBC momentDiscovered a new Twitter tool that I’m geeking out about a little. It’s called ‘Moments’ and it lets you string a bunch of tweets together — yours and others’ — to create a short story.  It’s a bit like Storify, which recently lost its battle with cancer … er … capitalism. RIP, brave fighter! ; )

Anyway, I’ve put a couple of cancer advocacy Moments together and am going to attempt to share them here. The first is from Lung Force Day at the University of Washington back in March, a very informative sweep of the latest in lung cancer screening stats; smoking cessation apps; electronic vaping and Diane Maping (sorry, couldn’t resist). ; )

It was also a lovely opportunity to see the UW’s glorious cherry blossoms and hobnob with the area’s lung cancer oncs, surgeons, radiologists, researchers and (maybe) one patient advocate? Let’s fix that.

cherry blossoms

Big shout out to Fred Hutch’s Jonathan Bricker and SCCA’s Donna Manders, who are both doing amazing work to help cancer patients get through treatment; kick their smoking habit and sidestep the creepy lung cancer shame and blame game. Remember, if you have lungs, you can get lung cancer. And even if people smoke, they don’t “deserve” to get fricking cancer. Nicotine is super addictive.

Ditto for a lot of the other things we do that give us this craptastic cluster of diseases: drinking too much alcohol; suntanning; sitting on the couch watching TV and eating crap food all the time instead of exercising.

Just sayin’.

lung force day snipHere’s my Lung Force Moment. Please excuse the typos, blurry slides and lack of chronology. You can reorder your tweets but I’m too damn lazy — the sun’s shining and it’s time for Miss Public Health Sciences to go practice what she preaches. ; )

Hope the information is helpful!

My second Twitter Moment is from the Inflammatory Breast Cancer talk that Houston area patient advocate Terry Arnold — aka @TalkIBC — gave in Seattle at the swanky, restyled Cancer Pathways (formerly Gilda’s Club) on Capitol Hill. Terry is an IBC patient who went through seven kinds of hell trying to get a doctor to correctly diagnose her big red swollen feverish boob back in 2007.

Seriously, health care? What a shitshow.

Terry shared her diagnosis story and her path to advocacy (so far, her nonprofit IBCNetwork Foundation has raised $1M for IBC research) and some incredibly infuriating (and darkly hilarious) stories and slides of stupid things her five doctors told her before MD Anderson took one look at her and figured it out (FYI, they actually have an IBC clinic). None of the other docs would believe it was cancer. One guy told her her boobs were aging at a different rate, FFS.

After giving a Patient Perspective talk to 30 or so young docs at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Terry brought it (and how!) to the breast cancer patient community, along with Drs. Julie Gralow (onc), Sara Javid (surgeon) and Diana Lam (rad onc).

The breakdown: IBC comes on fast and aggressive; presents as a red, swollen, feverish breast, sometimes with orange peel skin; is often misdiagnosed / mistaken for mastitis and thus diagnosed later; and it’s more prevalent in young women and African-Americans. It’s a tricky one, a rare one (but data is incomplete so it may be more prevalent than we think) and it’s absolutely treatable. One day, hopefully very soon, it will be beatable.

Here’s my TalkIBC Moment along with heartfelt thanks to all the patients and docs and researchers working to take this mofo down. Please share with your networks so more women — and more importantly more doctors! — learn about this creepy breast cancer subtype.

As always, thanks for the read. Cheers and enjoy the day.

Terry and her crazy diagnoses

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Your spring breast cancer advocacy roundup from Seattle

1 Apr

spring flowersIt’s been a busy few months in Cancer Advocacy Land and it’s going to get even busier as we head full on into spring. I’ll be lending my patient voice to a couple of Seattle conferences on cancer care cost, health equity/health disparities and policy in late April and early May. And my BC buddy Terry Arnold of the IBC Network is coming up from Texas to talk about inflammatory breast cancer at Cancer Pathways (formerly Gilda’s Club, Seattle) on April 19. As an oddball BC patient myself (diagnosed with ILC), I look forward to learning more about this subtype.

Speaking of BC subtypes, make sure you check out the great new lobular breast cancer website (here’s my Fred Hutch story on ILC). Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is the weird one where your cancer cells don’t have enough ‘glue’ to stick together so instead of a lump, they march through your tissues like creepy little ants. The upshot, lobular cells and ‘tumors’ grow more like a mesh or tree branch, which means in addition to not always making the standard lump, bump or “hard pea,” they’re hard to image. Mammograms can miss them; PET and CTs can miss them. Still a little unsure about MRI’s efficacy with ILC but would love to hear from radiologists/patient advocates on that point. ILC also pops up in some odd places when it metastasizes: your GI tract, your ovaries, the linings around your organs, even your eyeball area. It’s a freak.

But knowledge is power, right? Thanks to lobular buddy Leigh Pate’s efforts (and that of all the Lob Mob), this great new site offers resources and links and new clinical trials and much more information than I can fit into this “short-and-sweet” blog posts. Please go here: Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance, read up on the cancer, its metastatic spread pattern and how it differs from other ER+ BCs, and make sure your oncologist knows that you’re a special unicorn and needed to be treated as such. If you’re interested, there’s also info there on how you can join the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project and/or attend a lobular cancer research conference back in Boston this summer.

Good stuff is also happening with the Lymphedema Treatment Act, an “active bill” in the current Congress designed to help cancer patients who develop lymphedema after some or all of their lymph nodes are removed during cancer surgery. Breast Cancer patients are particularly vulnerable to this: full axillary lymph node dissection was standard of care for decades. In recent years, research has advised against this (thanks for your part in this, Gary Lyman!), so moving forward, breast cancer surgeons shouldn’t be harvesting healthy lymph nodes like ripe raspberries come summer.

This lymphedema legislation – which could still use your support! – will serve patients who’ve had their nodes taken and gone on to suffer swelling, pain, infection and other complications because their insurance wouldn’t pay for a compression sleeve and they couldn’t afford it to by it on their own. The bipartisan LTA, sponsored by Washington’s Rep. Dave Reichert; Senator Maria Cantwell (also of Washington), Senator Chuck Grassley, from Iowa, and many more, will do the following:

The Lymphedema Treatment Act (LTA) will improve coverage for the treatment of lymphedema from any cause by amending Medicare statute to allow for coverage of compression supplies. Although this legislation relates specifically to a change in Medicare law, it would set a precedent for Medicaid and private insurers to follow. 

Read more about the specific goals of the LTA here. Read my story on this common cancer surgery side effect here.

Science / advocacy quick hits: Went to the two-day Life Sciences Innovation Northwest Conference this last March 27-28 and heard about a bunch of cool new biotech startups, including one from Fred Hutch researcher VK Gadi (and others) that definitely warrants follow-up. SEngine Precision Medicine takes cancer cells from patients’ tumors or cancery fluid (think ascites), grows tiny little organoids with them, then tests out dozens (100s?) of drugs to see if any of them work. If they don’t work on the organoid and its particular mutations, then they don’t bother giving them to the patient and putting ‘em through all that rigmarole for nothing. If it does work on the organoid, then beautiful things begin to happen. I realize I’m being a bit of a breathless fan girl here but it’s a new and very targeted approach and I have a couple of (hundred) friends who could use a miracle. I’ll keep you posted. slide one - doublewhammiedAlso went to Portland mid-March for Komen Oregon and SW Washington’s Breast Cancer Issues conference. Was great to connect with some sisters to the south and hear about all the great health equity work that Komen Oregon is doing for people of color, for rural cancer patients and all the others who keep falling between the health care cracks. Was very honored that they asked me to share my story as the conference final speaker. Here’s a link to my talk (yes, I’m a hambone). Just doing what I can, while I can, to bring the information to the people. And kick cancer’s sorry ass, one bad joke at a time.

Thanks for the read, people. Happy Easter, April Fool’s (I blogged!) and love to you all.

Meet the #LobMob of breast cancer

18 Feb

lobular breast cancer patients

Illustration by Kimberly Carney / Fred Hutch News Service

Finally got a chance to write about lobular breast cancer, my particular flavor, and profile rock star patient advocate (and friend) Leigh Pate.

Leigh was diagnosed about the same time as me; she’s also a lobular gal and has already done a bit of advocacy around lymphedema, that really annoying swollen arm thing that breast cancer patients get when surgeons take out some or all of our lymph nodes.

Leigh and I met first over the Interwebs and later over cocktails at The Triple Door in downtown Seattle where we talked about lymphedema (or milk arm, as it used to be known). Because, you know, cancer patients know how to party.

After she recovered from treatment (and took a moment to breathe), Leigh sort of leaned into cancer research, as many of us do. She realized quickly that invasive lobular is lumped in (no pun intended) with invasive ductal and treated identically — mainly because lobular is almost always estrogen receptor positive (ER+ in cancerspeak).

But lobular is a different animal entirely, down to its tiny biological bits. And it’s a hard one to catch early, because it doesn’t image as well as ductal. Particularly if you have dense breasts — that’s where that whole “doublewhammied” thing came from. That and the fact I had two tumors in both breasts. Another weird lobular trait: many women have tumors in both breasts and/or have more than one tumor per breast.

There are other differences. Lobular spreads to oddball places like the GI tract when it metastasizes. The cells travel single file, kind of like deadly little tree branches. This weird growth pattern means it doesn’t always make a lump (mine was a “tuck” that pulled from inside and crumpled in when I raised my left arm).

But again, the cancer has been cast as “just like ductal” for a long time. So not everybody knows these quirky differences. Not even patients or PCPs or sometimes not even oncologists. Women come in with weird abdominal symptoms and they’re told they have irritable bowel syndrome (because hey, don’t ALL women have IBS?). But no, they have stage 4 lobular cancer.

leigh pate - lob mob

Leigh Pate, lobular breast cancer patient/advocate. Photo by Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service

Anyway, tired of the status quo and encouraged by an uptick in scientific interest, Leigh and a bunch of her BC buddies (the #lobmob), put together the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance to raise its profile — and eventually, they hope, funds for more research. The timing is perfect because there are some cool new  lobular studies being done right now (at Fred Hutch and elsewhere) and we can all help get the word out.

You can read my full story here, which includes some intriguing history regarding combined hormone therapy (HRT increases the risk of lobular, not ductal — I did not know this!). You can also see where scientists are looking, genetically, hormonally and otherwise, in order to shut this shitshow down.

As always, thanks for the read. Enjoy your day, peeps!

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