Conquering Cancer with Soap and Science
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
With a rare exception here and there, most scientists will at least complete a college-level science class before making their first cancer research breakthrough. Heman Bekele, on the other hand, is just wrapping up his sophomore year of high school. By the time he was named Time Magazine’s Kid of the Year in 2024, Heman was already generating buzz in the scientific community. The year before, he’d won the grand prize in the 2023 3M Young Scientist’s Challenge, in which kids compete to think of the most unique solutions to common problems. His entry? A soap that could...
info_outline
The Bell: A Viral Journey to Conquering Cancer
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
It started—as these stories so often do—with fatigue. At first, Jace Yawnick simply chalked it up to a busy life and a job requiring frequent travel. But then he noticed something: There were times the fatigue kicked in when he hadn’t just gotten off a plane or done anything else particularly strenuous. “Intuitively,” Jace says, “something within me just knew something wasn’t right.” Then came the coughing and the back pain. It would be months—and more than one misdiagnosis—before doctors found the problem: Hodgkin lymphoma. As he processed the news of his...
info_outline
The Comeback: How Emma Learned to Love Life Again
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
The first cancer diagnosis was scary enough. “I feel like Hollywood actually gets this moment pretty darn right,” Emma says, recalling the day—not long before her 18th birthday—that she learned she had cancer. “The world around you kind of slows down, you get tunnel vision, maybe a little dizzy. The only thing you can really hear is your breathing and your heart rate.” Eventually—following multiple rounds of chemotherapy—Emma was declared cancer-free. But then came the second diagnosis. “The key difference between the first and...
info_outline
Misinformed: The Online Rise and Real-Life Risk of Medical Misinformation
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
Whether you find it on social media, via search engine, or on a popular news website, it often seems like medical misinformation is everywhere, including in the cancer space. Maybe it’s the claim that sugar causes cancer to spread faster. Maybe it’s someone saying that people with dark skin don’t get skin cancer. Or maybe it’s the conspiracy theory that drug companies and government agencies are withholding the cure for cancer so they can continue to profit from expensive oncology care. These are just a few examples of purported cancer facts you might...
info_outline
Two Cancers, One Lung, and Seven Summits
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
While his teenage classmates were getting ready for school, then-13-year-old Sean Swarner was watching the water rise in the shower, his hair clogging the drain. His first cancer diagnosis—and the subsequent treatment regimen—took an immense toll on his self-image and well-being. That morning in the shower, he remembers, all of the fear and despair overcame him: Sean collapsed to his knees, tears and tap water streaming down his face. “I remember looking at myself in the mirror,” he recalls, “and I couldn’t even recognize who was looking back.” After a year of treatment, Sean...
info_outline
Lessons in Self-Care (and Self-Love) with Cancer Fashionista
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
For patients with cancer, the holiday season can be particularly difficult: How is anyone supposed to prioritize self-care and recovery at a time when much of the world is going on about the joys of giving? As a breast cancer survivor and a career fashion and beauty publicist, Melissa Berry is all too familiar with that challenge, along with the massive toll cancer can have on a person’s self-image. Enter Cancer Fashionista, a platform she’s built to help patients and survivors navigate cancer without sacrificing their self-confidence, self-worth, and self-empowerment. In this episode...
info_outline
Big Time Adulting: Kids, Cancer, and a Lesson in Laughter
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
Caitlin Murray has mastered turning life’s setbacks into something that brings joy to the 1.5 million people around the world who follow her Instagram page. When her 3-year-old son, Calum, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2016, Caitlin and her family’s lives were quickly filled with doctor visits, grueling treatments, and endless uncertainty. Soon after Calum’s devastating diagnosis, Caitlin launched her blog, Big Time Adulting, to help keep her family informed and to cope with the challenges of parenting a child with cancer. However, Caitlin’s unique style of humor ultimately amassed...
info_outline
Strength She Never Knew
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
Every 14 seconds, someone is diagnosed with breast cancer, making it one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers in the world, second only to lung cancer, and the leading cause of cancer-related death among women globally. And, while a cancer diagnosis can be devastating for anyone of any age or gender, one group faces a particularly unique and complex set of challenges: young working mothers. It’s a reality that Irish patient Aisling O’Brien knows all too well. Aisling spent most of 2023 undergoing numerous rounds of treatment—including breast-conserving surgery right before the...
info_outline
Picking Up the Pieces After Childhood Cancer
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
Prom. Graduation. College. These are just a few rites of passage that high school seniors everywhere look forward to. But for Auburn, a devastating turn of events tilted her entire world off its axis and put all her senior year plans on hold. At just 18 years old, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. Instead of graduating with her classmates and going to senior prom, Auburn endured numerous rounds of lymphoma treatment, which is notorious for being incredibly taxing, especially for younger patients. Fortunately, one of Auburn’s providers, Dr. Raymond Mailhot,...
info_outline
Three Months at a Time
Your Stories: Conquering Cancer
Gabriele “Gabe” Grunewald was a professional distance runner and a relentless optimist. She competed in Big Ten Championship races, became an NCAA track and field All-American athlete, and finished 4th in the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials. Such accomplishments become even more impressive when you learn that—even as she racked up accolades and wins—Gabe also faced cancer numerous times. In 2009, Gabe was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer called adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC). Then, in 2010, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Despite these circumstances, Gabe persevered,...
info_outlineNot only does cancer predate the practice of medicine, but it may also predate the human species entirely. In 2016, archeologists in South Africa unearthed a large 1.7 million years-old bone fragment, ultimately revealed to be the toe bone of an ancient but unknown species of human dating back millennia. On that piece of bone, they discovered something else: a malignant tumor. It’s a stark reminder that, for as long as their profession has existed, oncologists have been studying and treating cancer. For many, it raises a frustrating question: After so many centuries of studying cancer, why haven’t we cured it yet? The answer is complicated.
Dr. Otis Brawley joins the Your Stories podcast to help us better understand what makes cancer such a complex and persistent adversary. In addition to being a professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University and a former chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Brawley is a member of Conquer Cancer’s Board of Directors and editor of The Cancer History Project, a free online resource dedicated to documenting the history of cancer in medicine. He talks with host Dr. Mark Lewis about why cancer has not yet been “cured” and about how our study and understanding of it has evolved over time.