CURE Talks Cancer

Charlene Wexler has turned profound grief into a world of stories.


Wexler is the Chicago-based author of seven books as well as several short stories. Inspiration for what would become her 2014 debut novel, “Lori,” arrived following the loss of her son, Jeffrey, who received a diagnosis of leukemia in 1977 at the age of eight and died in 1981 at the age of 12.


“I always wrote for myself, and writing fiction is a new career. I started about 10 years ago,” said Wexler, who is now 80 years old. 


“Cancer has been in our family for years: aunts, uncles, my mother, my grandfather, I had ovarian cancer, right now I have skin cancer. And we've dealt with all of them,” she explained. “And the cancer that really knocked us out was when my 8-year-old son, my firstborn, was diagnosed with leukemia. And we fought at Children's Memorial (Hospital, now known as Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago). We dealt with that, we fought the cancer for four and a half years before he died. 


“And during that whole time, I wrote, I kept journals. And then after he died, I was devastated and (I) really couldn't get out of bed.”


Then, Wexler started writing.


“I took all my stuff together that I had been writing about him, and I wrote a story,” she said. “And I sent it to my sister who reads anything I write, who was there for me the whole time. And she said, 'This is great, but it's too devastating.' She said, 'Why don't you try again? Nobody's going to want to read this. It's just too grief ridden.'”

More survivor stories: Former Opera Singer Shares Bone Cancer Journey in New Book


Wexler shifted her writing from the first-person to the third-person and moved from memoir into the realm of fiction.


“I found (that), my God, I could change it,” she said. “And instead of making him a boy, I made her a girl. And when I first started writing, I thought, 'I'm going to make her survive it.’ That (even though) Jeffrey didn't, I'm going to make Julie, the girl in my story, live. But then, as I started writing, I realized I wanted to add what happened to me and how I survived — and how I didn't survive in the beginning.


“And then, after I wrote the first draft, I realized the book needed more than just a child dying from leukemia. And all of a sudden, the character Lori became stronger than the child that died. And I felt like there are a lot of issues I can deal with. A third of the book deals with the cancer, and it deals with surviving afterwards.”

Also from the “Cancer Horizons” podcast: Mother with Stage 4 Breast Cancer and Her Family 'Focus on the Living'


For Wexler, a former teacher who also spent time working in her husband’s dental office, “Lori” became the start of the four-book Laughter and Tears series, and her work is currently being re-released via Speaking Volumes.


Wexler spoke with CURE®’s “Cancer Horizons” podcast about her cancer journeys, her path to becoming an author and the different challenges faced by patients and caregivers.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

Last week, the European Society of Medical Oncology (EMSO) held their annual Congress in Madrid. The conference brought together cancer researchers from around the globe, who presented their clinical trial data — some of which has the potential to change the way cancers are treated. 


For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves therapies based on study data that proves that the regimen in question is safe, effective and superior to what is currently being used in that indication. While we don’t have a crystal ball and can’t say for sure if and when the FDA will approve a regimen, we can reflect on data presented at ESMO that we know the agency is considering and give our audience some potential oncology approvals that they should look out for. 

Welireg Outperforms Afinitor in Advanced Clear Cell Kidney Cancer

The FDA is currently reviewing the phase 3 LIFESPARK-005 trial, comparing Welireg to Afinitor for patients with pretreated advanced clear cell renal carcinoma. Data from LIFESPARK-005, which were presented at the ESMO Congress, showed that Welireg outperformed Afinitor when it came to progression-free survival (that’s the time a patient lives after treatment without their disease worsening) and objective response rate (which describes the percentage of patients whose disease shrinks or disappears from treatment). However, there was no significant difference in overall survival (time from treatment unitl death of any cause) observed between the Welireg and Afinitor groups. The FDA is set to make their decision on this Welireg indication by Jan. 17, 2024. 

Keytruda Plus Chemoradiotherapy Bests Standard of Care in Advanced Cervical Cancer 

Also on the FDA’s docket for review is findings from the phase 3 KEYNOTE-A18 trial, investigating the addition of Keytruda to external beam radiotherapy — known as EBRT — and concurrent chemotherapy and followed by brachytherapy, for the treatment of patients with newly diagnosed, high-risk locally advanced cervical cancer. Study findings, which were presented at the ESMO Congress, showed that adding the immunotherapy agent to the regimen improved progression-free survival, overall survival and response rates. One expert, Dr. Bradley J. Monk, even commented, “This is a celebration for patients because we’re challenging a treatment paradigm that has stood for more than two decades.” The FDA stated that it plans to make its approval decision of Keytruda in this indication by Jan. 20, 2024. 

Data Supporting FDA Approval of Pre- and Postsurgical Keytruda for Advanced Lung Cancer Presented


Days before ESMO, the FDA also approved Keytruda for the pre- and postsurgical treatment of patients with resectable (able to be removed via surgery) stage 2, 3A or 3B non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). 

The approval is based off findings from the phase 3 KEYNOTE-671 trial, which compared treatment with presurgical Keytruda plus chemotherapy followed by postsurgical Keytruda against presurgical placebo plus chemotherapy, followed by placebo.


According to the FDA, overall survival (the time from treatment until death of any cause) was not reached in the Keytruda group, meaning not enough patients in that cohort had died to determine an average time until death. The median overall survival time was 52.4 months in the placebo group.


Study findings presented at EMSO showed improvements in event-free survival (the time a patient lives without any disease-related occurrences, such as a recurrence/relapse or death), which was also not yet reached among patients in the Keytruda arm of the study.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

For patients with metastatic breast cancer, the annual October observance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month can bring a complex mix of emotions.

“I think a lot of the messaging in October tends to focus on pink, and it almost looks a little sparkly,” said Sally Joy Wolf, who first received a diagnosis of breast cancer eight years ago before learning it had metastasized five years ago.

Wolf, to be clear, doesn’t think there is any malicious intent behind what she described as the “sea of pink” in October.

“I really like to believe that everyone who is trying to wait raise awareness or trying to do anything on behalf of anything, any cause, any cancer — but in my case, breast cancer — the intentions are good,” she said. “But there are many points in life where good intentions may not have the intended results simply because people don't have a level of intimate awareness that that comes from being on the inside.”

In the U.S., there will be an estimated 297,790 new cases of breast cancer, comprising 15.2% of all new cancer cases, and 43,170 deaths from breast cancer, or 7.1% of all cancer deaths, in 2023 among female patients with breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute, which also stated that metastatic breast cancer (cancer which has spread to other parts of the body and is also referred to as stage 4 breast cancer) has a five-year survival rate of 31%.

“For me, every month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month,” said Wolf. “Because I am dealing with an appointment or a scan, or medicine refill or an insurance mistake. So even though I am thriving, and really I am flourishing, and living a life that I love and I consider myself healthy … when I'm then looking out at a landscape where everything is pink … it's a little bit like a celebration of how far we've come, of how curable this is, of how early detection is great. And that's all true, decades of awareness have benefited all of us, including me because I'm on medicines that might not otherwise exist, but it's also easy for someone in my shoes to look at the month of October and feel like we don't quite fit. We're not celebrating being cured.”

Dr. Dawn Mussallem, a lifestyle medicine and integrative breast cancer specialist at the Robert and Monica Jacoby Center for Breast Health at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, explained how she has observed the ways in which her patients with metastatic breast cancer have felt left out of the broader breast cancer community.

“When meeting these women for the first time, they share with me exactly what you are alluding to: the lack of supervised, positive support available for women with metastatic breast cancer, or a community they can belong to with other likeminded women going through the same thing,” Mussallem told CURE® via email. “The narrative shared with these women is different than for women with early-stage breast cancer. 

“You see (for) women with early stage 1 to 3 breast cancer, the medical team informs them (that) cancer cure is likely/probable with appropriate treatment; however, women with metastatic breast cancer get told something no one should ever hear because it can, in some situations, dampen any sense of hope: ‘You have stage 4 breast cancer and this is something we can’t cure.’”

Mussallem, a cancer survivor as well as a bone marrow and heart transplant recipient, pushes back against such messaging.
“We can’t change the circumstances of a cancer diagnosis,” she said. “It isn’t going to just go away. Once it is there, it is there until it is gone. We can succumb to the diagnosis, or we can use it as a springboard of growth, an opportunity to look deeply inward and make each and every breath mean something bigger and better than we ever imagine. It is a shame it takes cancer to do this, but cancer is a magical teacher of life. There is no better way to embrace one’s aliveness then to hear those words, ‘You have cancer.’ I know because I am a 23-year stage 4 diffuse B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivor. My cancer journey allows me to talk openly about the fear of dying and the glory of living now.”

Wolf, a longtime New York media executive, is now focused of advocating for wellbeing as a coach, advisor and speaker through LightWorks, where she is the founder and CEO.

“Sometimes it's a harder choice than others, but when we choose to see that light, even just like the tiny spark that may exist in a day, it is so helpful, because we come to realize that nothing is unilaterally light or dark or good or bad or all these labels we like to put on them and put on our lives as humans,” she said. “And even cancer, even in a metastatic cancer situation that I wish I weren’t in but I am, I can lean into meaning, lean into purpose, lean into gratitude and light. … ‘And I can say, this isn’t the life I expected to be leading. And yet, how grateful am I? How fortunate am I to get to live this life and get to make this impact with this card that I’ve been dealt?’ And I’m proud of how I’m playing it, so to speak.”

Wolf spoke with CURE’s “Cancer Horizons” podcast about her cancer journey so far, her life as a patient with metastatic breast cancer and the importance of life’s silver linings.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

For opera singer Kathleen Watt, a life-changing cancer journey began during an otherwise routine trip to her family dentist.
In January of 1997 when Watt was 43 years old, the examination of a bump in the gumline at the back of her upper jaw eventually led to Watt receiving a diagnosis of the bone cancer osteosarcoma, which would be followed by treatment that included chemotherapy and a decade-long process of facial reconstruction.

“A small corps of medical elites convened to excoriate my diseased bones with surgical wizardry and lethal toxins,” as Watt described on her website, “and stayed on to restore me to myself through a brutal alchemy of kindness and titanium screws.”

Watt had recently begun her third season in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City when she received her diagnosis. 

Approximately 1,000 new cases of osteosarcoma are diagnosed in the United States each year, and approximately only half of those cases are among adults, according to the American Cancer Society. Osteosarcomas account for approximately 2% of childhood cancers, “but they make up a much smaller percentage of adult cancers,” the American Cancer Society reported.

“I think it's common for people who are facing catastrophic illness or in a period of illness that you enter it thinking, ‘This is going to be a hiatus in my life, this is going to be something I'll get through and then I'll get back to my life,’” Watt told CURE®. “If you have a short illness or short, dramatic catastrophe and get it taken care of and you're done with it, it's easy to consider that a hiatus and then you get back to everything. 

“I think that the fact that my definitive reconstruction was so protracted over so many years, things kept going wrong, things kept not working, or they would work but not come to complete fruition, (it) was just never definitive, and kept me in a limbo for this long, long trajectory. And I had to think change my thinking from the fact that this was a hiatus or some kind of blank space that would (be) taken out of the flow of my life to a feeling that that this is part of life. Long or short, you're on a train that's taking you through your life, it's a view (that) is part of the landscape that you traveled through on the vehicle of your own energy that propels you (with) the propulsion of life along a track through a landscape which is going to change from catastrophe to joy to resolution to discovery, (it) is all one ride.”

Watt shares her story in her new memoir, “Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed,” which is set to be released on Oct. 10 by Heliotrope Books. That same day, she returns to the stage for a cross-country book tour launching at P&T Knitwear in New York City. (For a full list of tour dates and more information on “Rearranged,” visit kathleenwatt.com.)

 “In the years since I was onstage all the time, I really did not notice how much I had retreated into my naturally shy disposition, content to express myself through my kids’ Halloween or Spirit Week costumes, etc., avoiding the camera myself,” Watt said. “Then, in the selfie-revolution, and during the pandemic when everyone in the world took to Zoom, I felt myself shrinking from being seen on screen, becoming hyper-aware of my facial difference, such as it is. The ramp-up to this book tour has forced me to get off the dime, get over myself and just show up. I’m reminded of the time-worn advice to young singers, that no one in the audience has come to watch you be frightened, nervous or apologetic. They show up because they want to buy what you’re selling. They don’t want to see you be nervous or apologetic; they expect to see you succeed. They show up and pay for a ticket because they intend to be moved by what you have to offer. 

 “This live book tour has required me to call up my performer chops and dust them off, because honestly, I think this cancer journey is actually a success story that people are going to want to hear, and I am privileged to be able to tell.”

 In this episode of CURE’s “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Watt speaks about the importance of remaining present during treatment and how the notes she and her loved ones took during her cancer journey resulted in “Rearranged” decades later.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

For Andrew McMahon, a singer-songwriter and cancer survivor, the act of forgetting an anniversary was a good thing.

Alongside his band, Andrew McMahon and the Wilderness, he was set to play the inaugural Adjacent festival on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey on May 27, part of a daily lineup that included Paramore, Jimmy Eat World and Bleachers. 

The date of the festival coincided with a landmark moment in his cancer journey, which began in 2005. Before the end of a tour as part of Jack’s Mannequin, he received a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), for which he eventually underwent treatment with chemotherapy, radiation and a stem cell transplant.

“About an hour and a half before the show, I'm working on the setlist,” McMahon told CURE®. “And every day, I do the setlist and then at the top of the setlist I put the city and the date. And I asked somebody, like, ‘What's the date today?’ And they said, ‘It's the 27th,’ then as I'm typing the date, I realize, ‘Oh, that's the anniversary of when I was put in the hospital.’ 

“And we were in Atlantic City, and I had been between New Jersey and New York when I did the initial blood work that ended up leading to my hospitalization and eventually my diagnosis. Historically, that has been a very fraught anniversary for me. In the early years … even when I wouldn't realize the anniversary was coming up that weekend, inevitably, I was a mess. … So, being in a place now where I can actually forget those anniversaries, like they can almost pass me by and there's no trigger there, I'm on a healthy footing and that's pretty miraculous.”

McMahon founded the Dear Jack Foundation in 2006. The organization supports young adult cancer patients and survivors “through programs that provide support and community to a demographic far too often forgotten,” according to the Dear Jack Foundation website.

In this episode of the “Cancer Horizons” podcast, McMahon speaks with CURE® about life nearly 20 years after receiving his cancer diagnosis, shares the advice he has for patients who have recently received a diagnosis of their own and discusses his newfound love of surfing.

“The beauty of surfing is that you just have to you take what you get, right? A lot of it is about learning how to understand what the natural environment around you is doing and then using that to get yourself into just about the greatest feeling that you can have on Earth, which is riding a wave,” McMahon said. “And so, I think it's been very good for me in the sense that it has really hammered home how valuable and how important it is to commune with the natural world. 

“And it's also one of just the very few spaces I can think of where whatever's happening in my life and whatever's going on in my business, or things that I might be worried about or afraid of, or whatever, I just don't carry those things into the water with me. And it's not really a conscious thing. It's just once I'm there, you're just present. And I definitely, at this stage of my life — I've always been pretty good about keeping the phone at bay, and I'm not a huge social media guy, I'm not so plugged in, but I'm way more plugged in than I have ever been in my life — having a space where nobody can reach me and I can just do something that so akin to just play playing, I think as adults we don't play as much as we ought to is really good for the brain and I've found a lot of peace in the water for sure.”

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

It’s been more than 35 years since Peter Kahan and Dr. Ravi Munver first met. Back then, they were a teacher and his student, respectively. These days, the two men remain connected, but their relationship has evolved — Munver is now a key member of Kahan’s bladder cancer care team.


“To have to have a somebody who really looks upon you as a friend as (your) doctor, (who) really can see you as more than just another patient is great,” said Kahan, who described his connection with Munver, a urologic oncologist and vice chair of the department of urology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, as “completely” crucial to his cancer journey.


“You know, there are a lot of physicians who are phenomenal,” said Munver. “But when you meet them, to them you're a patient, and they care for you as a patient. It's very different when you either have a personal relationship with a physician, or you have a physician who literally has a motto that says ‘I treat all of my patients like my friends and family,’ meaning if Peter walked in the door or a family friend walked in the door or a distant family member walked in the door, I would treat them all exactly the same. One would not get more time or better treatment than another. So, when you have physicians that have that model where they treat every patient as if they were their own family member or friend, you just get a different feel flavor and level of care.”


Kahan was Munver’s honors physics teacher at the Dwight-Englewood school in northern New Jersey in 1987, where he noted that Munver was “one of my best students. … He was extremely meticulous and careful in his work.”


“Of all the sciences that I took — biology, chemistry, physics — physics really came easy to me, because it was math-based,” Munver said. “And I just remember obviously trying to do well in the class, but also enjoying the material. You have a great teacher, a teacher who teaches the material, who loves the material and has a passion for it, it makes that class that much easier and more fun and enjoyable, especially when you're first semester senior applying to college. And once I'd gotten into college, obviously, it was just a continuation of just more fun and learning. So, I really enjoyed class and I think what I remember most about it was it was a topic that was easy for me but enjoyable and very different from all of the other natural sciences.”


The two men re-connected years later at a memorial service for a former teacher at Dwight-Englewood. Kahan, retired from teaching and living in upstate New York, discovered blood in his urine in 2019, and he subsequently received a diagnosis of high-grade non-muscle invasive bladder cancer from his local urologist.


Treatment with the immunotherapy bacillus calmette-guerin (BCG) and the chemotherapy mitomycin inserted directly into the bladder followed. When his cancer recurred, Munver’s doctors recommended he seek a cystectomy, or removal of the bladder and prostate, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.


Kahan reached out to Munver, looking for a second opinion.


“As director of minimally invasive and robotic urologic surgery, I'm always looking at novel techniques, novel therapies that can offer patients good results, as well as a great quality of life,” said Munver. “And when Peter had told me about the traditional therapies that were being used, we use them as well. We use BCG. … When BCG fails, many urologists will jump to the next step, which is removal of the bladder. And that's what I learned in residency 22 years ago, and that's what people learned 30 years ago, and that’s what people learned 50 years ago, it was that was the only algorithm.


“However, a lot has changed, and I wanted to make sure that if he needed his bladder out, that (that) was the right thing to do. And it didn't have to be (done by) with me with robotic surgery, it could have been at any other institution of his choice. But at least I wanted to offer him a second opinion from someone who is in the academic space and knows all of the latest therapies out there.”


Munver surgically removed the tumor and treated him with the immunotherapy combination of BCG and interferon. When the tumor returned, Hackensack had received approval for the novel chemotherapy drug combination of gemcitabine and docetaxel, administered in liquid form directly into the bladder.

“In combination, the two medicines would really have a cancer cell destroying effect, and the clinical trials have been going on for years but we weren't able to accrue enough patients across the country and across the world to really see a demonstrable effect, we needed at least several year(s’ of) data to be able to say, ‘Yes, this works compared to our traditional therapies,’” Munver said.

“It's a massive undertaking to bring a new therapy to our patients, and we’d been working on it for months,” Dr. Nitin Yerram, director of urologic research at Hackensack, said in a statement. “Right when we were about to go live, Peter was looking for options.” 
Studies have shown that up to half of patients respond to this novel therapy and are able to avoid surgery, Yerram said. 
Kahan began treatment with the chemotherapy combination in January 2022, and he tells CURE® it has been approximately a year and a half since any tumors were found, through florescence in situ hybridization (FISH) tests, which check for chromosomal multiplications, have come back positive. “It's not necessarily that there are cancer cells, but there are cells that have a tendency to increase their proliferation. And we often see those in cancer cells,” Munver said.


“We have several patients who are on this therapy right now, and several of the patients do have a positive urine test, but there's visibly no evidence of tumor I can see,” said Munver. “And I can see tumors as small as one to two millimeters. … As I mentioned to Peter, if the tumors return, basically the bladder cancer will declare itself and to this point, it is not, and we are just monitoring him very closely. And you know, we cross our fingers and hope that this therapy keeps him with a really good quality of life for many years to come.”


In this episode of the “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Kahan and Munver speak with CURE about the importance of their friendship and their decision to embrace a new treatment option.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

Bill C. Potts, author of the book “Up for the Fight,” lends his experiences and knowledge about cancer to his readers as a five-time cancer survivor. 

“In September of 2020, I woke up from surgery to remove a really painful tumor in below my right hip,” Potts told CURE® during an exclusive interview. “And I had an emotional breakdown, when I was waking up from the surgery in the recovery room, and they called in the pastor and we talked through a lot of things, including the reasons why I should continue to fight the battle. And at the end of that conversation, the pastor told me that I should turn my pain into purpose and write a book to help others.”

In 2002, at 42 years old, Potts received a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. Since then, he has experienced four cases of lymphoma and, most recently, received a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Potts knew he needed to share his story with others, so during chemotherapy treatments, he picked up his laptop and began writing. He grasped the opportunity to urge fellow patients to advocate for themselves, as he learned to do. 

Potts, at 63 years old, recently celebrated two years in remission and chooses to live in the moment, spending each day doing what he wants to do.

In this episode of the “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Potts speaks with CURE about his cancer journey and his book “Up for the Fight.” 

“I'd kept my cancer (a) secret until the book came out. And now that the book is out, it's challenging at times, because it's hard to talk about,” he said. “Sometimes it can be triggering to talk about it, but mostly what I find is that it's rewarding, and the impact that it's having on other cancer patients. So, I would say that it's a responsibility.”

Since sharing his story through writing his book, others with similar experiences have also picked it up, which Potts said was encouraging. It further motivated him to promote his book as a guide for patients and their families. Potts told CURE that he especially wanted to promote the book to patients experiencing cancer right after being diagnosis, “so that it can make a difference in their journey.”

Potts explained that he didn’t have guides to turn to when he was first diagnosed, and emphasized how this book was one he wished someone else had written for him. Or, as he describes it, “there really wasn’t that how-to guide out there, like ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting,’ but for cancer.”

Now, the book has become Potts’ purpose. 

Potts admitted that he didn’t “own his journey” when he was first diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “I let the doctors tell me what to do, and that that decision still may cost me my life,” he said. “So, the first thing is that you have to create the mindset, that this is me, it's my job. And the key part is the job part, to get better and to own the journey, that it's a little bit counterintuitive to a lot of people that you own your journey, not the healthcare team. But the healthcare team appreciates a patient that owns their journey.”

In “Up for the Fight,” Potts stresses to his readers that owning their journeys and advocating for themselves is necessary. He told CURE some tips that worked for him: research potential cancer treatment centers, get a second opinion, take notes during appointments, build relationships with care teams, communicate with doctors and care teams, research the drugs and treatments that will be used and ensure proper mental and emotional support. 

“I do that through groups on Facebook, which is super helpful, but professional help, like therapists, things like that is also a great way to own your journey,” Potts said during the interview. “And I really have been lucky to get to know a lot of people through the book (who) are owning their journey and that also inspires me (and) gives me hope.”

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

It’s been nearly a decade since Christina McAmis began her journey with stage 4 breast cancer. At the time, she was a 32-year-old married mother of three, including twin boys and a baby daughter, and had recently begun studying at a California law school.


“All sorts of positive, amazing things were coming together into what I thought was going to be the happiest time of my life,” she told CURE®.


While breastfeeding her six-month-old daughter, McAmis found a lump, approximately half of the size of a grain of rice, close to her sternum. Given her family history of breast cancer, McAmis began seeing Dr. Claudia DeYoung, an internist specializing in breast health who runs the Center for Breast Health at the South Sacramento Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.


“We had done an ultrasound and determined that it seemed like just a lymph node, I was still nursing so having a lymph node swollen in that area was not surprising,” McAmis said. “I had just started law school, so my nursing schedule had been completely changed because of that (and) my daughter never did ever take a bottle. … And so, we had decided to watch that and if there were changes to let Dr. DeYoung know.”


McAmis became wrapped up in law school, and a couple of weeks before midterms she received an emergency phone call while picking up her sons from school.


“I needed to come home right away, my townhouse was on fire,” she said. “And literally the townhouse next door burnt down to the ground, we were lucky enough just to sustain some really heavy smoke damage. I spent that night with my 12-month-old — who does not sleep well at other people's houses — at my friend's house.”


McAmis had to wake up at 6 a.m. the next day for an appointment with DeYoung, but she was in no mood to do so.


“I was like, ‘I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this,’” she said. “But somewhere in the back of my brain was just like, ‘You've got to do this, it needs to just happen.’ So, I pulled on my big girl boots and trumped off to Dr. DeYoung's office. And we decided to biopsy at that point, because the mass had not gotten really much bigger, but also had not gone away at all.”


Testing determined that McAmis had breast cancer, that the disease was in her lymph nodes and she a lesion on her breastbone, just above her heart.


“At that point, we decided to stop playing, (that) this was stage four, that it had metastasized,” she said.


Chemotherapy, then surgery to remove her breasts and ovaries, followed. McAmis, now working as an attorney, and DeYoung have reconnected via the Cancer Survivorship Program following McAmis’ completion of active treatment as she transitioned to maintenance therapy.


“You know, that grain of (rice), pea-sized lump that Christina and her husband had felt, looked on imaging (to be) benign,” DeYoung said. “But it wasn't. … That follow-up is crucial. That follow up by Christina, that follow up by her care team. And so, I'm glad we stayed on it.


“And again, there's always hindsight and (you could say) ‘Coulda, woulda, shoulda,’ (but) the fact of the matter is we made the best decision at the point in time with the evidence that we had, with the agreement that we're going to monitor this and if it goes away, then great (and) if it doesn't or if it changes then we're going to go down a different route. And we were true to that plan. And thank goodness we were.”


In this episode of the CURE “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Christina and Dr. DeYoung discuss her cancer journey and Christina shares how she and her family have navigated it together for the last nine years.


“I … told (my children) that right now, we're living,” McAmis said. “I am living, and we're going to focus on the living.”

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

The work continues, and evolves, for the team at Latinas Contra Cancer as the service and advocacy organization working with Latino patients with cancer approaches its 20th anniversary later this year.


“The needs have changed,” executive director Darcie Green, who has been with the organization for five years, told CURE®. “It's important for organizations to do this continuous check-in to see, 'Is our mission still needed? Have parts of it been accomplished, have the needs of the people we're serving changed?'”


Founded in 2003 by journalist and cancer survivor Ysabel Duron and based in San Jose, California, Latinas Contra Cancer has, according to its website, “educated over 7,500 individuals about cancer, resulting in hundreds of preventive screenings and many early detections.”


The organization piloted a patient navigator program at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Sobrato Cancer Center which was purportedly the first of its kind in 2010, trained more than 200 community health educators across the country, hosted National Latino Cancer Summits and opened a wig and prosthesis boutique. 


Green’s connection to the work of Latinas Contra Cancer is deeply personal.


“My grandmother passed away of breast cancer, and while she was battling breast cancer and looking for a support community, she was in the very first support group ever held by LCC,” Green said. “And so, I know firsthand how important that work was at the time, and how really revolutionary it was, even defiant in a way, that patients deserved access to care in their language and in ways that weren't just based out of hospital settings and clinic settings, which can be traumatic for some people, you know, in itself.”


Green said that although Latinas Contra Cancer’s original mission of health education, research and fostering relationships between patients and providers was largely focused on individual behavior, and that work remains, in the modern medical landscape “the language around culturally and linguistically competent care is very normalized, at least here in the area where we're at. We know there are other places in the country that are lagging far behind. But for where we where we are, it's normalized, and many organizations have patient navigators.”


The overall mission, however, has “changed pretty radically” during her time with the organization, as Green explained.


“We have evolved to focus much more on systems and still holding up the importance of individual behavior but recognizing that you really can't individual behavior your way out of health injustice and systemic health disparities, that these are less about the problems with patients and more about a healthcare system that is just not adequately meeting the needs of all of its patients,” she said.


“And so, as we have started to look more at systems, and how we could have patients doing everything right — like my grandmother, right, everything was healthy: healthy lifestyle, maintaining a healthy diet, didn't smoke, drink, didn't do any of those things — and (they) still got breast cancer. … We're still doing service providing, we're still doing health education and patient navigation and patient advocacy, and all of those programs have evolved as you would expect. And we've added this other space of programming that is our first venture into what's not service providing outside of research. And so, we are full speed ahead into this area of patient organizing.”


In this episode of CURE’s “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Green tells us about the evolving mission of Latinas Contra Cancer and story of the organization’s Defensoras health advocacy cohort, a 10-week training program launched in 2021.


“As an organization, we have been very much changed by the (COVID-19) pandemic, because our population is the medically vulnerable, immunocompromised folks, and Latino and low-income,” Green said. “And in this area, we know that the Latino community was hit the hardest economically as well. And so ethically, our response to that has been: 'It's not enough just to help people navigate health disparity. It's not enough just to help people navigate what we know to be a completely predictable, preventable injustice. We have to eliminate it.' And not we as LCC, not we the individual employees at LCC, we have to start holding space for patients to become powerful, and to eliminate those disparities for themselves.”

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