-In the years leading up to when I was diagnosed with cancer, my life was going pretty darn well.
I mean, I had agreat life. I was trained as a physician, I was trained actually as a social scientist,
and my work really involved improving the quality of care,
you know really trying to understand the patient experience, where it worked and where it didn't.
And you know, in the time leading up, I had a wonderful, beautiful wife and we had two beautiful. amazing boys.
It was an ordinary, but a very blessed life.
There had been some clues that something was wrong for several months leading up to it,
but you know, as my breathing continued to get worse, we finally got a chest x-ray.
And you know, initially you're a little bit numb, but all of your coping mechanisms kick in.
And so you're hoping that it turns out to be something else and then, you know, you get the call.
They've done the initial results and you've got some kind of lung cancer,
and its metastatic, so it obviously already spread, and
it's like a punch in the stomach.
And you, kind of, you hold it together initially, but when you actually get to the point of
then having to communicate that to your wife, let alone talking to your kids, that's incredibly hard.
-What we found out was this wasn't something your just going to deal with, this was drawing a distinctly short stick.
So it was stunning, I was terrified as as a mom of two kids.
And then occasionally we'd get the questions from one of the two kids, "when will daddy be well?"
And you try to figure out what's the best answer for, you know, I think maybe we'll get through this.
We didn't ever tell them that about 1/20 people make it 5 years.
-The survival rate was very low for that one, even with conventional treatment.
As a husband, as a spouse, as a father, as a son, you want to be incredibly positive and hopeful.
At the same time, as a physician - the writing was on the wall. So that was hard.
A couple weeks later, I got a call from one of the research centers saying we had a new test,
it's not really yet on the books for a mutation called ROS-1, which is in about 2 percent of the patients.
And I had that mutation.
And better yet, it was similar enough to the other mutations that they thought that
medicine Crizotinib, which had worked well for one mutation might work
for this one and they actually were opening up a new trial and one of the
places they were doing this was at UC Irvine.
So I was the second person in the world with the mutation I had who was trying this particular medication.
That would have only been about 3.5 to 4 weeks, the lung looked almost normal.
The tumors were still there, but they were no longer active. They were not acting like cancer.
At that point, it was not only like, ok this stuff might work.
For me, there was a chance but it really opened, helped open the floodgates for a lot of other patients.
-And it wouldn't have been possible without going into the trial.
It wouldn't have been possible if Allen had said it's not worth giving this a shot.
UC Irvine health is - the last thing - it is a tremendous resource,
but it's provided so much phenomenal care to so many people. It's made a difference for my family.
-You know you have this gem right here in Orange County with UC Irvine Health,
where this is one of the leading centers in the world on precision medicine, on targeted therapy, on genetic testing,
and targeting of different kinds of cancer, and particularly lung cancer.
But the people here, in the treatments I've received, are a large part of why I'm still here
five years after getting what was supposed to be a terminal cancer.
You can't put words to it. Thank you.