I spend my days looking at columns of numbers, trying to map out patterns of who gets sick, who survives, and why. I am trained to look at cancer through the objective lens of a dataset.
But every once in a while, you meet someone who speaks your exact language—the language of clinical evidence, tumor mutations, and survival curves—except they didn't learn it in a laboratory. They learned it because their life depended on it.
Her name is Deborah. She is a health sciences librarian, a mother, and an eleven-year outlier of metastatic melanoma. When we sat down to record, she described her path through the American medical system as a surreal trip where Alice in Wonderland meets sci-fi.
What does it look like when a medical miracle and a medical crisis happen within a day? One minute, Deborah's care team is high-fiving over a completely clear lung scan. Less than twenty-four hours later, a sudden inability to find her words lands her in the ER—where doctors discover nine tumors hidden in her brain.
It is a story of lightning-fast clinical shifts, highly toxic drug combinations, and the raw creative survival of a woman who literally had to write her way through a crisis.
This episode is the first of two, and drops on 7/15.
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Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube & Amazon Music #ChangedByCancer #MelanomaOutlier #Scanxiety #PatientAdvocacy #LateStageMelanoma #BrainMetastasis #RealStories #Epidemiology #HealthSciences #AliceInWonderland
