College student fights his own cancer

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

February 25, 2008

I thought that this story was amazing, from a completely different point of view than you would imagine. Sure, it sucks he has cancer, but this is just a totally different spin from what we’re used too!

From the article;

The terrible headaches come over Christmas break. Josh undergoes testing before returning to school.
His mother, Simone, gets the phone call at her home in Greensboro. A doctor herself, she takes the news from a fellow physician calmly, clinically. Then she hangs up and goes to pieces, as any parent would.
She gets in the car and drives to campus with Josh’s dog Dassi. Josh is on his way to the climbing wall when his cell phone rings. “I’m in Durham and we need to talk,” Simone tells him.
He is puzzled, then remembers the recent MRI. His heart thumps. When he meets her at the dorm, she is holding back tears.
A cancer diagnosis is devastating, whatever the type. Nearly 220,000 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, 178,000 of breast cancer, 154,000 of colorectal cancer.
Chordoma — the cancer Josh learns he has — is a one-in-a million disease. Just 300 people get the terrible news each year, not even one per day. It strikes all ages, at different spots along the spinal column. The tumors can be removed, but the cancer is relentless. Chemotherapy doesn’t work. Life expectancy is around seven years.
The MRI shows Josh’s tumor is in a tough spot, in a bone inside his skull. It extends onto his brain stem and wraps around several arteries. There are two surgeries, then weeks of recovery in the hospital. He and Simone pass the time reading whatever they can about the disease.
There isn’t much. The massive apparatus of medical research — pharmaceutical companies, foundations, universities, government agencies — is utilitarian. High-prevalence diseases are at the front of the line, rare ones like chordoma usually at the back.
But then, a stroke of good fortune. It turns out that the only researcher in the country with a grant to study chordoma happens to be at Duke, working in a VA lab across the street from campus.
They meet Michael Kelley in his office on a Sunday. They talk about the research and where it might go next. Kelley says he’s willing to proceed, but he’ll need things like equipment and staff to work in his lab.
Well, Josh says, you can put me to work.