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Nancy Schepers and her husband were driving to a family wedding in Windsor in 2012 when her cellphone rang with an urgent and stunning message from her doctor. Get back to Ottawa immediately, he said, there is a hospital bed waiting for you.
Schepers, Ottawa’s deputy city manager at the time, a woman known as professional, unflappable and very private, was taking a few days off from an intensely busy period at work where she was overseeing the city’s light rail project as it neared final approvals. As one of the most important bureaucrats in the city, work days could be punishingly long and demanding. She was often there when the lights switched off at 7 p.m.
So news that her blood tests had turned up something seriously wrong — leukemia, likely — might have drastically altered the course of her life and, as a consequence, affected the way one of the city’s biggest infrastructure projects unfolded.
But it didn’t.
Looking back, 57-year-old Schepers says she thinks she missed no more than a few half days of work and “a few hours here and there” after being diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a form of leukemia that affects about one in 100,000 people and, until recent years, was often fatal. More astonishingly, very few of her colleagues knew she had just been diagnosed with cancer.
Her story is a real-life example of how research and scientific progress is changing some cancer diagnoses from almost certain death sentences, for some patients, to manageable chronic illnesses. Schepers is benefiting from groundbreaking treatments for CML, something that has so moved her son Ryan DeBruyn, that he is raising money so that more people can have similar experiences after being diagnosed with cancer.
Schepers, who has retired as deputy city manager and will complete a contract as executive adviser for light rail planning and implementation in the coming weeks, is telling her story now, in part, because of her son.
DeBruyn, 29, who describes his mother as his best friend, was moved to raise money for cancer research in the hopes that more people’s cancer stories could one day be like his mother’s.
“This is a cancer story, but with a very happy ending and it is thanks to those who gave before us. I hope we can do our part to help those who come after,” wrote DeBruyn on his Facebook fundraising page, Ryan’s Locks for Leukemia (facebook.com/ryanslocksforleukemia).
Last week, DeBruyn, who has been growing his hair to raise money for the cause, got it cut. Schepers, who had been nagging her son to get a haircut, met him at a Toronto barbershop to watch him lose his locks. Debruyn had exceeded his goal of raising $1,600 as part of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s Tender Loving Research initiative in honour of his mother’s experience. That goal has since been raised to $5,000, with the help of his own money, money from other supporters, and half of the tips DeBruyn earns as a waiter.
A former member of the Canadian national beach volleyball team, DeBruyn said he and his sister, Lauren, were upset by their mother’s diagnosis and impressed by the medical attention she received and the medication that has reduced her leukemia to a manageable chronic condition with few serious side-effects.
“It is amazing. If every person who was diagnosed with cancer one day was to get this kind of news — that it is survivable and will not affect your life (in a big way) — that is a future I would love to see,” he said.
Treatment for CML did not always go so smoothly. Until about a dozen years ago, a diagnosis of CML often had a prognosis of fatal. “Back then, our only hope of dealing with this was to do bone marrow transplants, which were risky. We did not have a good therapy, short of transplanting patients,” said Scheper’s hematologist Dr. Isabelle Bence-Bruckler.
The median survival rate after diagnosis was about four years.
That changed about a dozen years ago when the first targeted therapy was approved. The drug Gleevec was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2001 under the headline: “There is new ammunition in the war against cancer. These are the bullets: Revolutionary new pills like Gleevec combat cancer by targeting only the diseased cells. Is this the breakthrough we are waiting for?”
Gleevec was a pill that by targeting a key protein would, essentially, put the cancer into remission. Since then, second generation targeted drugs for CML have come along that can induce a “deep remission” in many patients.
They target a protein — known as a tyrosine kinase — which causes CML cells to reproduce out of control. Gleevec and other drugs known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors are now the standard treatment for CML.
Schepers takes a drug called Tasigna twice a day and said her energy levels returned to near normal soon after she started on it. Prior to that, although she continued with her busy life, Schepers said she was tired, dragging and losing weight. “Something was definitely wrong.”
Bence-Bruckler says trials are getting underway to determine whether some patients can be taken off the drugs that control CML and still remain in deep remission.
Some people are even using the term “functional cure” to describe the effects of such drugs on CML, because doctors are unable to find any sign of it in some patients while on the medication. A cure for cancer in the form of a pill? Not yet, but pretty close.
Schepers, meanwhile, admits that she wasn’t comfortable talking about the illness when she was first diagnosed and told very few people. She is doing so now to support her son’s fundraising efforts and has “come around” to the idea of going public about her experience.
“Having had a career in the public service, my focus has always been on improving the lives of others. I am so grateful for the care that has been available to me due to the advances in cancer research, in large part, due to the research achievements at The Ottawa Hospital. My son’s actions reminded me that there are other ways that I can help support my community. I hope that by sharing my story as an example of the incredible treatments available, this can in some small way help bring awareness to the hospital’s work and generate funds for their current campaign.”
查看原文...
Schepers, Ottawa’s deputy city manager at the time, a woman known as professional, unflappable and very private, was taking a few days off from an intensely busy period at work where she was overseeing the city’s light rail project as it neared final approvals. As one of the most important bureaucrats in the city, work days could be punishingly long and demanding. She was often there when the lights switched off at 7 p.m.
So news that her blood tests had turned up something seriously wrong — leukemia, likely — might have drastically altered the course of her life and, as a consequence, affected the way one of the city’s biggest infrastructure projects unfolded.
But it didn’t.
Looking back, 57-year-old Schepers says she thinks she missed no more than a few half days of work and “a few hours here and there” after being diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a form of leukemia that affects about one in 100,000 people and, until recent years, was often fatal. More astonishingly, very few of her colleagues knew she had just been diagnosed with cancer.
Her story is a real-life example of how research and scientific progress is changing some cancer diagnoses from almost certain death sentences, for some patients, to manageable chronic illnesses. Schepers is benefiting from groundbreaking treatments for CML, something that has so moved her son Ryan DeBruyn, that he is raising money so that more people can have similar experiences after being diagnosed with cancer.
Schepers, who has retired as deputy city manager and will complete a contract as executive adviser for light rail planning and implementation in the coming weeks, is telling her story now, in part, because of her son.
DeBruyn, 29, who describes his mother as his best friend, was moved to raise money for cancer research in the hopes that more people’s cancer stories could one day be like his mother’s.
“This is a cancer story, but with a very happy ending and it is thanks to those who gave before us. I hope we can do our part to help those who come after,” wrote DeBruyn on his Facebook fundraising page, Ryan’s Locks for Leukemia (facebook.com/ryanslocksforleukemia).
Last week, DeBruyn, who has been growing his hair to raise money for the cause, got it cut. Schepers, who had been nagging her son to get a haircut, met him at a Toronto barbershop to watch him lose his locks. Debruyn had exceeded his goal of raising $1,600 as part of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s Tender Loving Research initiative in honour of his mother’s experience. That goal has since been raised to $5,000, with the help of his own money, money from other supporters, and half of the tips DeBruyn earns as a waiter.
A former member of the Canadian national beach volleyball team, DeBruyn said he and his sister, Lauren, were upset by their mother’s diagnosis and impressed by the medical attention she received and the medication that has reduced her leukemia to a manageable chronic condition with few serious side-effects.
“It is amazing. If every person who was diagnosed with cancer one day was to get this kind of news — that it is survivable and will not affect your life (in a big way) — that is a future I would love to see,” he said.
Treatment for CML did not always go so smoothly. Until about a dozen years ago, a diagnosis of CML often had a prognosis of fatal. “Back then, our only hope of dealing with this was to do bone marrow transplants, which were risky. We did not have a good therapy, short of transplanting patients,” said Scheper’s hematologist Dr. Isabelle Bence-Bruckler.
The median survival rate after diagnosis was about four years.
That changed about a dozen years ago when the first targeted therapy was approved. The drug Gleevec was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2001 under the headline: “There is new ammunition in the war against cancer. These are the bullets: Revolutionary new pills like Gleevec combat cancer by targeting only the diseased cells. Is this the breakthrough we are waiting for?”
Gleevec was a pill that by targeting a key protein would, essentially, put the cancer into remission. Since then, second generation targeted drugs for CML have come along that can induce a “deep remission” in many patients.
They target a protein — known as a tyrosine kinase — which causes CML cells to reproduce out of control. Gleevec and other drugs known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors are now the standard treatment for CML.
Schepers takes a drug called Tasigna twice a day and said her energy levels returned to near normal soon after she started on it. Prior to that, although she continued with her busy life, Schepers said she was tired, dragging and losing weight. “Something was definitely wrong.”
Bence-Bruckler says trials are getting underway to determine whether some patients can be taken off the drugs that control CML and still remain in deep remission.
Some people are even using the term “functional cure” to describe the effects of such drugs on CML, because doctors are unable to find any sign of it in some patients while on the medication. A cure for cancer in the form of a pill? Not yet, but pretty close.
Schepers, meanwhile, admits that she wasn’t comfortable talking about the illness when she was first diagnosed and told very few people. She is doing so now to support her son’s fundraising efforts and has “come around” to the idea of going public about her experience.
“Having had a career in the public service, my focus has always been on improving the lives of others. I am so grateful for the care that has been available to me due to the advances in cancer research, in large part, due to the research achievements at The Ottawa Hospital. My son’s actions reminded me that there are other ways that I can help support my community. I hope that by sharing my story as an example of the incredible treatments available, this can in some small way help bring awareness to the hospital’s work and generate funds for their current campaign.”
查看原文...
