“I have no doubt that new gene therapies will become the solutions we need to fight cancer. They are already transforming the world of medicine…Researchers around the world are really just beginning to scratch the surface. There are many barriers, but there is incredible potential…Gene therapy offers our best hope for real progress toward real cures.”
Overcoming the Unexpected: Sarcoma Survivor Tells His Story
Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Clinical Trials
Managing Your Emotions After Cancer Treatment
With your treatment completed, you'll likely see your cancer care team less often. Though you, your friends and your family are all eager to return to a more normal life, it can be scary to leave the protective cocoon of doctors and nurses who supported you through treatment.
Everything you're feeling right now is normal for cancer survivors. Recovering from cancer treatment isn't just about your body — it's also about healing your mind.
What It's Like to See Your Mom Battle a Rare Cancer
Meet Korene Mosher
My amazing nurses inspired me to become a nurse and now a doctor so that I can now share my experiences with my oncology patients and those dealing with similar circumstances. I did not expect to live and as a result I have an outlook on life that only sees the good, positive and joys in little things. I have an excitement about life that I would not have, had I not gone through a life or death situation. I love being able to participate in new activities and experience new things and see the sun rise each morning and dance in the rain simply because I am alive to do so. I never thought I would live to be an adult so each day is a new adventure and a journey to be the best version of myself that I can be so that I can share my life with those around me and especially my patients going through cancer and chemotherapy treatment now.
Facing Mother’s Day After the Death of a Child
I don’t feel much like celebrating Mother’s Day this year. My 15-year-old daughter died 51 days ago, after being plagued by a rare, relentless form of cancer for five years. I’m not sure what the celebration is supposed to look like when I failed at my main task as a mother: Seeing my child safely to adulthood.
I realize that attributing the death of my child to my own failure is irrational. I understand that guilt and blame won’t bring her back, that we tried valiantly to cure her with treatments that ranged from a liver transplant to chemotherapy to radiation. I know cancer kills children every day. But she wasn’t a statistic. She was my child, and I couldn’t save her.
I couldn’t save her.
Meet Amy Mahaffey
In the summer of 2015, I began to have pain in my left side. It felt like I may have cracked a rib. I let it go and continued my busy life as a wife and mom of three children. The pain continued and did not get any better. I noticed that I was becoming breathless climbing the stairs in our home and I was not sleeping well at night. I went in to the Doctor and had some blood work completed and all my numbers looked fine. My doctor did schedule a sleep study which came back stating I did not have sleep apnea, but they noticed I was not really sleeping either. A few more weeks went by and on Halloween, my husband put his arm around my side and squeezed and I remember the intense pain I felt. I knew I could not wait any longer. I went to Urgent Care on 11.1.15 and they did a chest X-ray. I immediately noticed that my chest X-ray did not look normal. They referred me to have a CT scan and determined I had some sort of a mass in my chest. This mass was causing the sleeplessness because of the pressure on my lungs.
How to Face Mother's Day Without Mom
“It can be really, really hard to go about celebrating the day, especially if you’ve recently lost your mother,” she tells us. “And I recognize that. But it’s so important to do so. It’s so important to continue to celebrate your mother and her spirit, and to realize that even though you won’t be together in a physical sense this year, she's with you in spirit.”