A "Mission Moment"

I wrote this Mission Moment on December 5, 2007 for the Winter and Spring Teams

This coming weekend is a big milestone for me. I will reach the five year remission mark this Sunday – I call it my “Gimme 5” milestone. It was five years ago that my last chemo cycle ended, and my seven month saga with Hodgkin lymphoma was over. A CT scan a week or so later confirmed that my body had no evidence of cancer remaining. What an incredible feeling that was! I was still weak and tired, and remember coming down with a severe cold right after that, but that all seemed minor. I guess there are probably a lot of factors that played a role in my survival, including the luck of the draw, the grace of God, determination, a positive attitude, family and friends, health insurance, good medical care, decent physical conditioning, and medical research. I think that is probably only a partial list.

Note one item in that list – medical research. Think about it. In 2002, my odds of reaching this point were great for cancer – about 80 to 85%. Only a few decades before, a blink of an eye in human history, my odds would have been maybe 40%. Not too long before that, maybe 10%. As my oncologist told me once during chemo, “Hodgkin lymphoma is one of our real medical success stories. When I (this is the doctor speaking, not me) was an intern back in the 1960’s, people who got it received treatment for six months or so, were incredibly sick, and then died.” The difference is medical research, clinical trials, new drugs, and a near exponential growth in medical knowledge.

There is rarely a day that goes by when I don’t reflect for at least a few minutes about how grateful I am to be a cancer survivor. I am very well aware that it didn’t have to be that way, and is not that way for so many people. I think often of people working on this problem back in the 1950’s – 1970’s, working to save my life decades later. They had no idea, and I don’t know them. I can’t thank them, at least not directly. So I am thanking you, because some time in the future, someone who doesn’t know you will be thanking you. They will have survived because of some medical advance that was funded by all of our collective efforts. Thanks so much for getting involved in TNT, and working to make a difference.

GO TEAM!
Art (Winter Team for the Arizona Marathon)