Extraordinary Offering v.1

Extraordinary Offering 

The inspiring stories of volunteerism with the Foundation For Molecular Medicine

This is a series of stories from the volunteers at the Foundation For Molecular Medicine, who offer the extraordinary gift of themselves to the mission of the organization. The stories reflect the diversity of personal experiences each volunteer brings to the organization along with their motivation and desire to improve the lives of others. 

Volunteerism truly is the Extraordinary Offering.

My Story – Why I created the Foundation For Molecular Medicine

By: Frank Szczepanski

During 2011, my wife Carol was well into her third occurrence of metastatic breast cancer.  She was undergoing treatment at UChicago with a relatively mild form of chemotherapy that was administered 2-3 times a month.  I took her there for every IV Therapy and observed other patients in the waiting area – often 20-30 patients each visit. Usually they were not the same people, but their faces read the same: that look of suffering, or resignation for what they were about to experience.

You see, each time a patient’s name is called, then they need to have their vitals and blood pressure taken along with a blood sample which means a needle stick.  They then go back to wait for the laboratory to process their blood and produce a CBC (comprehensive blood count) report.   If satisfactory, their chemo will be prepared by the in-house pharmacy and then, the slow-drip of toxic chemicals takes place in one of the beds in the IV Therapy room. 

Each patient experiences the pain, the anxiousness, and subsequent side effects of today’s modern medical method for “curing” cancer.  The paradigm for diagnosis and treatment has not radically changed in over 25-50 years.

Knowing that my biotech company, IVDiagnostics, had developed a way to monitor Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) I wanted so badly to let each of patients (especially my wife) to have their oncologists monitor the root cause of metastatic disease, i.e. CTCs and

not just look at CBC counts and images from CT, PET or Bone Scans that can only detect solid tumors.  Patients need to know what is happening at the cell and molecular level inside their bodies; otherwise the oncologists have no true way of knowing if the patient is in remission, or if the treatment being prescribed is really working.

So we began the journey of Educating people on the need for Early Detection and Remediation of cancer as well as how to use healthy diet, exercise, lifestyles to prevent the onset of cancer.  Molecular analysis of captured CTCs is also available with today’s technology as we have proven in our laboratory – but patient’s need to know how and why this can be done much earlier than waiting for a solid tumor to appear.

My wife was a victim of 20 years of living with metastatic disease.  The treatment during 2011 seemed to work and her doctors declared that she was in remission.  Unfortunately in 2012, she suffered her fourth occurrence and her cancer had spread once again – this time to her abdomen and then to her lungs.  She passed, but her spirit lives on through the work of the Foundation For Molecular Medicine.

Carol Szczepanski

    

Carol Szczepanski was chosen as November’s Calendar Girl by the Pink Ribbon Society in 2011.  She was the strongest woman I ever knew. A true fighter who survived 20+ years of living with metastatic breast cancer.