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Will’s mother is doing just fine, but his father died of lung cancer two years ago, aunts and uncles have died of various cancers or are dealing with them, and one of his sisters is winning a fight with breast cancer now.
“I’ve been going through it for years,” he said softly. “It’s one of the scariest things you can imagine.”
by Ryan Pretzer
For all the technological advances in detecting breast cancer, it was the old-fashioned method that may have saved Sarah Krause in 2005. Her doctor discovered a lump in one of her breasts during a routine visit.
“I had a mammogram and they didn’t find it,” said Sarah, whose diagnosis was later confirmed by an ultrasound. She says her story illustrates the importance of conducting self-checks as well. “In retrospect [the doctors] said they wouldn’t have called me back based on what they found.”
Sarah knew the treatment would be grueling. She also knew what was at stake for her daughters, Ashley and Stephanie, who were then 14 and 12. Sarah was 16 when her mother passed away from a brain tumor at age 42 – the same age Sarah was when she walked into the doctor’s office.
“I didn’t let go, I didn’t give up,” Sarah said. “I just kept fighting.”
Sarah underwent a mastectomy, later getting a breast implant, and endured eight rounds of chemotherapy – the most possible – followed by radiation every weekday for a few months. She completed the treatment in February 2006. She continues to take medication to keep the cancer in remission.
Sarah faced her ordeal head-on, approaching it with the attitude it must be done. Her personal motto was “It sucks, but I’ve got to do it.” She said it so often her husband, Tim, wanted to put it on a T-shirt.
Sarah found support in God, her family and friends, particularly a high school friend living in Chicago who was undergoing treatment at the same time. The friend also was diagnosed during a doctor’s visit – an appointment she made after her sister had passed away from the disease.
“She called to tell me her sister saved her life,” Sarah said.
Sarah, who spent 15 years in the nursing field and plans to return now that her children are older, wants women to realize that, with early detection and modern medicine, breast cancer does not have to be a death sentence.
“My job now as a survivor … is to tell them, this is very, very beatable,” she said. “This is a disease that is now very treatable. It’s not a disease that has to kill you.”
Sarah hopes that point will come across to The Palace audience at halftime of the Pistons’ home opener on Friday. Sarah and another friend, Carolyn Balcerowiak, also of Shelby Township, will be among the breast cancer survivors who will be honored at center court.
“It’s just being there with survivors, with fighters,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about – showing everybody you can beat this.”
“I just want to be a part of it,” Bynum said. “It’s still hard for me to go to a hospital. It puts me in memory of that all over again, especially dealing with my dad. I was in Israel (playing professionally) when he was going through it. I came back and my dad came literally from the hospital to my daughter’s baby shower. The strength he showed me by just being there … I know how much pain he was in. It was really tough for me. It’s scary, really scary.”
The war on cancer is being waged on many fronts by people like Dr. Stephen Ethier, a Wayne State University pathologist and a director at Detroit’s Karmanos Cancer Institute, which is partnering with the Pistons on Friday’s fund-raiser.
There is no silver-bullet cure for cancer, “because cancer is not one thing,” Ethier said. “What we will continue to do is improve our understanding of different types of cancer and different subsystems like breast cancer. The goal of the research is to allow us to be able to manage each of those different kinds of cancer appropriately.”
Groundbreaking cancer research takes millions of man hours and billions of dollars, but Ethier says even the most modest fund-raising efforts serve a critical purpose. While major research projects are usually funded by federal grants that run into the millions, the case for winning those grants is built on preliminary clinical research funded at the grass-roots level – by events exactly like Friday’s Breast Cancer Awareness fund-raiser the Pistons are hosting.
“It’s the jump start,” Ethier said. “It’s what allows us to get the work rolling. The federal funding agencies are not risk-takers. If you come to them with a crazy idea, even if it’s crazy brilliant, it makes them nervous. So you’ve got to come up with something that shows them, look what we did with these preliminary experiments and it really works, and then it gets funded.
“It’s not uncommon at all for us to approve a $25,000 seed grant for a young scientist that he or she turns into a $2 million (National Institutes of Health) grant. That’s the way it works. Sometimes people think, ‘If I give $10 or $1,000, it’s just a drop in the bucket.’ But it’s what gets the process rolling.”
At Karmanos alone, 50 separate clinical research trials on new drugs are ongoing.
The quest for knowledge became far more than a professional pursuit for Ethier when his wife was recently diagnosed with lobular breast cancer, a type of cancer traditional screening methods detect ineffectively. It was discovered not by mammography, but by an MRI. And through his research, Ethier and his team at Karmanos are pioneering the development of a three-dimensional ultrasound technology that can detect lobular cancer as effectively but 10 times more efficiently than MRI screening.
A much less uncomfortable procedure than mammography, the ultrasound testing will be more effective as a detection device for women with dense breast tissue – typically, younger women.
Funding that fueled the Human Genome Project to crack the genetic code “was huge,” Ethier said.
“What would have taken a lifetime of work in the day before the Human Genome Project, now you can do it in a year, sometimes in a month,” he said.
Progress doesn’t come evenly on every front. At one end of the continuum, childhood leukemia and leukemias and lymphomas in general are now much more treatable than ever. In the middle, certain cancers that haven’t yet been fully beaten can be much better managed through the use of ever-improving drugs developed through research. And for other cancers, like pancreatic and ovarian or cancers discovered in their late stages, progress has come grudgingly.
Breast cancer detection and treatment have made tremendous strides even in the last 10 years with the development of new drugs like trastuzymab, more commonly known as herceptin, and an even newer one called lapatinib, available for two years.
“(Herceptin) is a drug that emerged directly as a result of research on the particular kinds of genes that can cause breast cancer,” Ethier said. “One of the most well-understood breast cancer genes is Her-2, which plays a very important causal role in about 20 percent of breast cancer cases. For those with the Her-2 gene working, it dramatically improves treatment and survival. That’s a great example of the role that research plays in the treatment of specific types of cancer. It would have no clinical benefit for any patient that did not have the Her-2 gene working.”
As dramatic as progess has been, Ethier, when putting it in layman’s terms while speaking to groups, makes the analogy to mountain climbing.
“You don’t know what you don’t know and you never know as much as you think you do,” he said. “I compare it to scaling a mountain. The first part is not too steep. The higher you go, the tougher the sledding gets. We’re at a part of the mountain where, for some cancers, we’ve still got a long way to go.”
With the help of their fans, the Pistons hope Friday’s Breast Cancer Awareness fund-raiser pushes the climb one step closer to the summit.
