Fast Forward -- Transition to Realtime

When I began converting my blog into a weekly newspaper column, I was concerned about what my health would be like a year hence. That was in September of 2008. As a result, my articles in the Sun to date have been published on what was, in effect, a one year time delay. I have now published 52 articles in "Living with Cancer".

I would like to continue my story by bringing you up to date. Today begins the second year of my column and because my health is currently excellent I am going to start writing in "real time" rather than on a time delay. I completed my consolidation chemo on May 30, 2008. The following week I flew to California and on June 7th accomplished my first goal after being diagnosed, which was to live long enough to give my oldest daughter away at her wedding. Nearly everyone that Paula and Brian invited came to the wedding, which was held at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. We had 158 guests who celebrated not only the wedding, but my living long enough to be there.

After the wedding we went with some of our good friends to Las Palmas at Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs. We spent a few days relaxing, playing golf and celebrating life. It was truly a wonderful time that I will never forget.

After the wedding Yoko and I traveled from Florida by auto train to Washington DC to lobby Senators Nelson and Martinez. Our visit was arranged by a lung cancer advocate and patient support group, Lung Cancer Alliance, which had been pushing legislation called "The Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act." The proposed legislation directs the National Institute of Health and other federal agencies to make lung cancer research a national research priority. The goal of the legislation is to reduce lung cancer mortality by 50%.

Lung cancer survival rates (defined as living five years from date of diagnosis) is a depressingly low 15% overall. For Stage III and IV l lung cancer patients, survival rates are even worse -- only 5%. Lung cancer survival rates have hardly changed in 40 years. In comparison, breast cancer survival rates are over 89% and prostate cancer survival rates are 99%. In the case of breast, colon, and prostate cancer, there are screening protocols for finding the cancer early. There are no screening protocols for lung cancer. Yoko and I felt that more had to be done.

More people will die of lung cancer (30% of ALL cancer deaths) than breast, prostate, liver, kidney and colon cancers COMBINED. Twice as many women will die from lung cancer than from breast cancer; three times more men will die from lung cancer than prostate cancer, yet lung cancer gets the least amount of funding of all the major cancers -- $1414 per death compared to $23,754 per death from breast cancer, which gets the most funding. It's unbelievable and makes no sense to me whatsoever.

We met with the legislative aides to the Senators, not the Senators themselves. They were sympathetic to our cause and had no idea that there were such large discrepancies in federal funding. But it was clear to me that they would resist legislating “body part specific research.” And politically no one wants to come near my idea of having a portion of the federal excise tax on tobacco (over $8 billion annually) be used for lung cancer research. That would make way too much sense.