[WAPO] The oncologist was blunt: Stefanie Joho’s colon cancer was raging out of control and there was nothing more she could do. Flanked by her parents and sister, the 23-year-old felt something wet on her shoulder. She looked up to see her father weeping.
"I felt dead inside, utterly demoralized, ready to be done," Joho remembers.
But her younger sister couldn’t accept that. When the family got back to Joho’s apartment in New York’s Flatiron district, Jess opened her laptop and began searching frantically for clinical trials, using medical words she’d heard but not fully understood. An hour later, she came into her sister’s room and showed her what she’d found. "I’m not letting you give up," she told Stefanie. "This is not the end."
That search led to a contact at Johns Hopkins University, and a few days later, Joho got a call from a cancer geneticist co-leading a study there. "Get down here as fast as you can!" Luis Diaz said. "We are having tremendous success with patients like you." |