Strong Women with CLL Lift Each Other Up

To say Michele Nadeem-Baker was shocked to receive a blood cancer diagnosis is no understatement. At the time, her life was going at fast-forward speed. Michele was working globally as the chief of communications for a well-known multi-billion-dollar corporation, with teams running press events and handling crises around the world. She had recently married the love of her life, becoming a stepmom to three wonderful kids. She felt great.

A routine annual blood test revealed something unusual going on with her blood and further tests revealed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Michele was stunned. She didn’t fit the profile. CLL is diagnosed more frequently in much older people, most often men around age 70.

“I had no family history, I was very healthy,” Michele said, noting she was able to work long hours and still be a regular at her gym. Active and on the go, she traveled extensively for work and split her at-home time between Boston and Miami, where her company was headquartered. Her schedule kept her going practically 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She found time to exercise but sleep alluded her.

Running Towards a Cure for Multiple Myeloma

Kenny Capps was running for his life. In 2018, the lifelong endurance athlete ran 1,175 miles in 54 days across the length of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina to raise awareness and funds for the disease he’d been diagnosed with a few years earlier, multiple myeloma.

In an eye-popping Patient Power article about his cancer odyssey, Kenny takes you along for his run, (basically a marathon per day!), starting from Jockey’s Ridge State Park in the Outer Banks.

Jockey’s Ridge is the tallest living sand dune on the Atlantic coast and a popular location for hang-gliding, flying kites, and soaking in glorious sunsets — it is breathtaking to visit. I have a new-found appreciation for this amazing run, having run my first race, a trail run over streams and through the woods in southern Maryland, earlier this year.

How To Tell Young Kids You Have Breast Cancer

One morning in November 2014, just after her 40th birthday, Beckie Gladfelter felt a lump in her breast. She scheduled an appointment with her doctor and was concerned, but not alarmed; she had no family history of breast cancer and hadn’t even had her first mammogram yet.

However, a mammogram, ultrasound, and biopsy confirmed that Beckie would become one of the one in eight women in the United States to be diagnosed with breast cancer that year.

She was shocked. Her mind filled with so many thoughts. How should she tell her family? How serious is this cancer? Would it take her life?

Beckie’s kids were in second grade, kindergarten, and preschool at the time. How should she tell the kids?