It all started with a cough in 2014. I was 34 years old, and it was cough and cold season, so I thought nothing of it. But it kept getting worse.
Finally, I went to a doctor, and a chest X-ray turned into a five-month chain reaction that ended in the oncology department at Mayo Clinic.
It was lung cancer. It came out of nowhere. I didn’t smoke, I wasn’t exposed to radon. There was no clear explanation.
It was also Stage 4 and had already spread to my lymph nodes, spine, and ribs. It would eventually reach my brain.
At that moment, I was incredibly grateful for three critical things:
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Health insurance – I had access to quality health care through my employer’s insurance.
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Biomarker testing – The team at Mayo immediately tested my tumor cells for known biomarkers and found one.
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Research – Targeting the biomarker they identified started as an idea in a scientist’s head in 2004, became a clinical trial in 2007, was an FDA-approved targeted therapy in 2011, and was available for me when I was diagnosed in 2014.
If this could happen to an otherwise healthy 34-year-old with three young kids—who were 6, 4, and 2 at the time—it could happen to anyone.
That’s why protecting Medicaid funding is so critical. If I didn’t have access to quality health care, I might have made different decisions—like postponing that chest X-ray and letting the cancer spread further. That’s what people will do if they lose access to Medicaid.
Protecting the National Institutes of Health is just as important. The breakthrough cancer therapies that came out of NIH research wouldn’t exist without funding. These life-saving treatments take years to develop, and so many are in the pipeline right now. Cutting funding would be catastrophic, setting us back years in the fight against cancer.
