My Sister’s Battle

When I had lymphoma in 2002, one of the things I felt was that at least I was taking care of my four siblings chances of getting cancer for the next 20 years or so. Sadly, I was very wrong about that. In February, 2007, I got a message from my sister Ann that she almost certainly had breast cancer. I had gone through my own cancer very stoically, but my sister’s news had me fighting back tears, even at work, for several weeks.

Ann has had a very rough go of it. Her treatments have made my six months of chemotherapy look like a walk in the park. She had HER-2 positive breast cancer, which was very hard to treat until recently, when a new drug, Herceptin, was developed. Unfortunately, we would learn that her cancer was resistant to this treatment. She has now gone through 17 straight months of treatment, including 4 totally different chemotherapy regimens, a mastectomy, and a couple of months of radiation. She had a whole new cancer form while on her third chemotherapy, which was designed to prevent new cancers from metastasizing. She has been a real trooper throughout it all.

Ann’s name was the first name that I wrote on my Arizona Marathon shirt, and any time the training or the race got tough, all I had to do was think of what she had been enduring. She is still far from out of the woods, although the combination of radiation, mastectomy, and the fourth chemotherapy has us hopeful that she is done with all this very soon.

Having my sister go through cancer so soon after mine just affirmed the importance of raising money to fight cancer. I knew that I couldn’t go into full bore fund raising mode for breast cancer so soon after raising over $11,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, but I wanted to do something for this cause.


Here we are in April, 2007, a couple of months after her diagnosis.