Dr. Hunt on TV

I came across this clip of Dr. Jason Hunt on a local Utah news program talking about head and neck cancer. It's not the most exciting stuff in the world, but it's a bit emotional for me to watch it. During the segment, I see the same expertise and ability to explain that played such an important role in keeping me calm during the many many appointments I had with him the month before my neck surgery. I dare say that his expertise played an even bigger role during the very successful surgery he performed on me. I'm so grateful to have had him as my surgeon.

An Update

As of right now, I have been cancer free for close to 13 months. I'm back at Yale for my senior year after having worked for 6 months, first at a Palo Alto software company and then at a finance firm in New York. I'm certainly not in the best shape of my life, but my health is no longer an all consuming problem. I'm incredibly grateful that it has recovered to the point where I could work at those two companies, both of which are on this list. Indeed, the other day I caught myself saying "I've had a good year" which I had to quickly amend to "I've had a good six months."

Some Day...

I will cough and not start irrationally worrying that it means my cancer has returned, this time in my lungs. That day can't come soon enough.

755 Inches

Wow:

That's the top of Snowbird's home page. They're at 755 inches for the season, which is just shy of 63 feet. I chose a good year to take time off from school. I missed more than a month of skiing after my surgery in November, and then I moved to California at the beginning of March, so I had a shortened season, but even so I got in a 18 days at Snowbird, several of which were truly epic.

My Article in the Yale Daily News

I argue for the importance of making cancer a research a priority before you actually encounter the disease yourself. Of course, it took being diagnosed with cancer for me to realize the importance of this. You can find the article here.

Interesting Status That's Been Floating Around Facebook

A few of my friends have posted this as their status on Facebook:

We have a thousand wishes: To be thinner, be bigger, have more money, a day off, a new phone, to date the person of your dreams. A cancer patient only has one wish: to kick cancer's ass. I know that 97% of you won't post this as your status, but my friends will be the 3% that do. In honor of someone who died, is fighting cancer, or had cancer, post this for at least one hour.

I'm touched by the sentiment it expresses. I have an objection, though, to its claim that a cancer patient only has one dream. The scariest thing about cancer isn't that it might kill me. What terrifies me the most is that my melanoma might keep me from achieving some of my dreams. So kicking cancer's ass isn't my only dream. Instead, it's the dream that I can only truly achieve through pursuing all my other dreams. That's why I made a point of climbing the tallest mountain I could find before I had Matt take this picture. Climbing mountains is my way of continuing to pursue the dreams that were threatened by my diagnosis.

FDA Approval for Ipilimumab!

The big news in the world of melanoma this month- or more realistically, this decade- is the FDA's approval of ipilimumab as the first drug ever to show significant benefits for metastatic melanoma patients:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) to treat patients with metastatic or late-stage melanoma, the most deadly type of skin cancer.

The drug, ipilimumab, will be sold under the brand name Yervoy. Some analysts have predicted the product will eventually reach blockbuster status with sales topping $1 billion annually. The drug was approved for patients who have tried prior therapy as well as previously untreated patients--a wider patient population than originally expected.

"Late-stage melanoma is devastating, with very few treatment options for patients, none of which previously prolonged a patient's life," said Richard Pazdur, the director of the FDA's office of oncology drug products. "Yervoy is the first therapy approved by the FDA to clearly demonstrate that patients with metastatic melanoma live longer by taking this treatment."

Truly fantastic news!

Incidentally, this article is the first real history of ipilimumab that I've seen. It's pretty dry, but it gives a good sense of how long it took the drug to go from basic research at UC Berkeley 15 years ago to a life saving treatment today.