In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

After her prognosis in the spring of 2024, LuAnne Sirdiak started writing. Not for herself, and not for the world — she created a private Facebook group called Life!, and invited people in. For three years she has documented the scans, the treatments, the waiting, and everything in between, for a group she chose.

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In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

LuAnne Sirdiak spent a year waiting for her cancer to grow enough to qualify for a clinical trial. When she got in, she stayed on treatment longer than anyone else — long enough that her results changed how the trial was run.

This is the final part of my conversation with LuAnne. We talk about what being in a trial did to her, and what it gave her: the say she had in her own treatment, the dose decisions she was part of, and what it means to her that the data from her body may help the people who come after. And we talk about the question every patient considering a trial eventually has to answer for themselves — knowing everything she knows now, and where she is today, would she do it again.

Music: Ester - Here (BenSound) License certificate #2242649

In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

After her diagnosis, LuAnne Sirdiak started writing. Not for herself, and not for the world — she created a private Facebook group called Life!, and invited people in. For nine years she has documented the scans, the treatments, the waiting, and everything in between, for a group she chose.

Here's part four of my conversation with LuAnne.

Music: Ester - Here (BenSound) License certificate #2242649

In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

There's a part of a cancer diagnosis that doesn't get talked about much — the work of carrying other people's feelings about it. The reassuring, the softening, the deciding what to say and what to keep to yourself.

LuAnne Sirdiak knows that work from both sides.She was a sister before she was a patient, and She was caring for her sister who had small cell lung cancer when she received her own diagnosis. 

Here's part three of my conversation with LuAnne.

Music: Ester - Here (BenSound) License certificate #2242649

In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

There's a word for the place LuAnne Sirdiak has been in quite a lot. Liminal — the space between what was and what comes next, when the thing you were doing has ended and nothing has taken its place yet. For LuAnne, that's time off a clinical trial with no treatment on the calendar, and no clear picture of what's ahead.In our first conversation, she walked through her years of lung cancer treatment — the surgery, the radiation, the prognosis she outlived, the trials. This time we talk about what it's like to live without a plan. We talk about how cancer has changed her life, about loneliness — the particular kind that comes from being the only person in the room who understands your situation — and about what kind of support she's looked for, and what has helped.

Here's the 2nd episode of my conversation with LuAnne.

Music: Ester - Here (BenSound) License certificate #2242649

In this series, the 2025-26 Clinical Trials Experiences Through Storytelling Program, we talk to cancer survivors who have a passion for telling their stories in order to help others who may be navigating the clinical trials experience.

In 2017 Luanne Sirdiak was diagnosed with squamous non small cell lung cancer. She had a lung resection and four cancer free years. Then the cancer came back, resistant to radiation, resistant to several lines of systemic therapy, with no actionable biomarkers to point toward what to try next. For nine months, there were no treatment options at all. In 2023, she was given a six month prognosis. In 2024, Luanne qualified for a clinical trial and completed nine cycles of targeted treatment.  She went on to complete eleven cycles on the CCI-001 trial at the Cross Cancer Institute.

She's not on a trial right now and that too is part of this experience. The waiting, the qualifying, the starting and the stopping. She's lived the full arc of the clinical trials process and she wants other patients to hear it in her words.

Here's the first in the series of my conversations with Luanne.



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Dr. Steven Bialick discusses treatment options for pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Steven Bialick discusses the various symptoms that may be present with pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Steven Bialick discusses the types of lab tests done on patients with suspected pancreatic cancer, including CBC, CMP, CEA, and CA19-9.

Dr. Steven Bialick discusses genetic testing in pancreatic cancer, including the difference in germline and somatic testing, and which mutations may have known treatments.