One family, many cancer stories

Welcome to Diagnosis: Cancer, a blog for news, intriguing ideas and honest experiences of living with cancer. We want this to be a meeting place where survivors, advocates, caregivers and researchers can share their knowledge and their questions.

As a health journalist, I've followed advances in cancer treatment and diagnosis for years, writing on topics ranging from liquid biopsies, to how patients react to learning they have cancer, to the hardship of paying for expensive cancer care.

And like so many people, I have a personal story to tell.

Cancer has affected my grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, and cousins on both sides of the Nathans and Rush families. It's a history that reflects the astonishing medical diversity of cancer, the rapid advances of recent years, and the stubborn intransigence of some forms of the disease.

I have vivid memories of the tattooed purple dots that marked the neck of my paternal grandmother Esther Raymond to target the site of her radiation treatments for lymphoma back in the 1960s.

No one, least of all Esther, would talk openly about her illness. Cancer was whispered about mostly by my mother and aunts after we kids had been shooed off into another room.

My grandmother succumbed to her disease. To my then-teenage eyes she appeared to quietly fade away.

In the next generation, cancer struck my mother Emma and each of her seven siblings – Izzy, Abey, Davey, Bobby, Danny, Sophie and Fay. Each had a different cancer -- melanoma, uterine, head and neck, prostate, ovarian and leukemia. Genetic testing wasn't yet available, so we never knew if there were hereditary links, environmental factors or just phenomenal bad luck.

Some of the cancers proved fatal, but others, like my mother's ovarian cancer, did not. Following a hysterectomy and removal of her ovaries and fallopian tubes at Penn Medicine, she lived another 20 years, without radiation or chemotherapy, before dying of something else at age 93.

My cousin Sheryl Nathans, on the maternal side of my family, wound up in the Doylestown Hospital emergency room on a winter day in 2002 after she took a tumble on the sidewalk and sprained her ankle. She mentioned that her head had been bothering her, there'd been a few minor chest pains, and, oh -- her handwriting was getting shaky. Within three months, Sheryl, at age 55, was dead of cancer that already had spread from her lung to her brain.

But Sheryl, a former Syracuse television and radio reporter, didn't fade away quietly like our grandmother. At a hospice in Wynnewood, she decorated her room with furniture from her home, including leopard-printed chairs and bright posters. Sheryl chose to live her fate out loud, surrounded by good friends and supportive family members, a striking presence in Pucci-patterned muumuus and meticulous manicures.

Cancer was no longer a guilty, hidden secret.

Ten years later, another first cousin on my mother's side was diagnosed with breast cancer. She could choose from a range of treatment options, ultimately landing on mastectomy and reconstruction. She's doing fine.

My family has another connection to cancer: my uncle, Daniel Nathans, shared the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his important work in discovering restriction enzymes. These are DNA cutting enzymes made from bacteria. Among other things, restriction enzymes helped to make it possible to think about mapping the human and cancer genomes, each of which have played a huge role toward targeting treatments based on the genetic makeup of tumors.

For several years after my mother's ovarian cancer, my gynecologist recommended I take the CA125 blood test to check for a cancer antigen in women at high risk for ovarian cancer. I also underwent a yearly transvaginal ultrasound. Later, I took a test for the BRCA mutation, which proved negative, and she said I could forego both the CA125 and the ultrasound. Meanwhile, I get yearly mammograms and try to take comfort in the idea that only about 15 percent of cancers turn out to be hereditary.

Now, as the editor of Philly.com's newest health blog, I want to present the cancer stories of new patients, longtime survivors, doctors, nurses, researchers, families and friends. I've shared some of my stories; I look forward to hearing yours.

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