The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund

This article was originally published in the Cherokee Ledger-News on 4/3/12.
By: Jessica Wagner
(PHOTO INSERT:  Rep. Sean Jerguson, R-Holly Springs, and former Holly Springs Councilwoman Jacqueline Archer stand with a sample lung cancer awareness vanity plate. The plates should be on the back of vehicles by this summer. Photo special to the Ledger-News) 

In less than two months, former Holly Springs City Councilwoman Jacqueline Archer has accomplished something that takes many people a year, if not years, to achieve.

A bill calling for the production of a lung cancer awareness vanity plate passed both houses March 26 and has made its way to Gov. Nathan Deal’s office; the bill had not been signed by press time.

“I am just so excited,” said Archer. “I had no doubt that it was going to go through, but I had no idea that the other license plates, according to Rep. Sean Jerguson, have taken a year or more.”

Archer, 47, called the bill a victory for anyone who has been or will be affected by lung cancer in the state.

“It all started in Cherokee County because that’s where I am from, but if we could start it here and continue on, then that’s where I would like to go,” she said. “I am thinking big.”

Twelve additional states, including California, Illinois, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey and Maine, have pledged to follow in Georgia’s footsteps with a vanity plate that will mirror Archer’s mission of spreading lung cancer awareness.

“What I am working on right now is an example of what Georgia’s process was for getting the license plate through all of the hoops, understanding that other states may have nuances that are particular to that state,” Archer said.

As a stage III never-smoking lung cancer survivor, Archer said spearheading the specialized license plate has been a dream of hers since she overcame her battle with the disease in August of 2005, just 12 weeks after being diagnosed.

Her diagnosis came as a surprise six years ago when Archer was involved in a car accident. At the hospital, doctors found an orange-sized mass, which, along with 31 lymph nodes, was successfully removed.

Her survival sparked a mission to spread awareness about a disease that she called “underfunded.” The pieces began falling together this past January after Archer teamed up with Jerguson and The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund to make her vision a reality.

The state required 1,000 pre-order commitments prior to legislators casting a vote.

While the vanity plates met the requirements set forth by the state, residents interested in donning the lung cancer awareness plate on the back of their vehicles can still place orders at www.lungcancerlicenseplate.org.

“We are supplying to the Department of Driver Services everyone who is pre-paying for the license plate, along with the county that the resident lives in and their driver’s license number,” Archer said.

By this summer, residents who placed pre-paid orders, as well as first-time payers, can pick up their plates.

The money collected from the vanity plate sales are pre-designated for the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALCMI) through the listed recipient, The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund.

“Now, we are going to be able to see a financial impact on research and early detection so that we can reach the goal by 2020 of having a survival rate of 50 percent versus the 15 percent that has remained unchanged for the last 40 years,” Archer said.

In addition to taking lung cancer awareness vanity plates from coast-to-coast, Archer is traveling to Washington D.C. for a Congressional event April 19.  During the event she will speak to legislators about unmasking lung cancer on purpose and not by chance, as was her story.

“I am going to testify on behalf of early detection,” she said, adding it is a collaborative event with herself and Dr. Henry Krebs, director of interventional radiology at St. Joseph’s Hospital. “He will be speaking to the medical side of lung cancer; I will be speaking to the lack of early detection screening and my story.”

Archer has also reached out to Cherokee County Tax Commissioner Sonya Little to promote the lung cancer awareness vanity plates during National Lung Cancer Awareness Month every November. 

This article was originally published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on 2/27/2012

By Michelle E. Shaw 
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For years, organizations such as Lung Cancer Alliance and the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health have dedicated countless hours and millions of dollars to educate the public about lung cancer and new developments in detection and treatment. Yet, as well-known as these entities are, their message often is overshadowed by other cancers, especially ones with higher survival rates such as breast cancer.

Advocates say they need all the help they can get — from those who survive and the families of those who do not — to continue to raise awareness.

“The way I look at it, there is no over-awareness right now, only under-awareness,” said Laurie Fenton Ambrose, president and chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based Lung Cancer Alliance. “We need to combine forces and strategize about how we build a more compassionate and comprehensive approach.”

Enter Chris and Keasha Draft and their Team Draft initiative, “Changing the Face of Lung Cancer.” The couple started the effort together, with the official launch at their wedding 
Nov. 27. The goal of the campaign is to raise funds to aid lung cancer research and education. But the task fell solely to Chris Draft after his 38-year-old wife died Dec. 27 on their one-month anniversary.

Keasha Rutledge Draft never smoked and was an athletic woman. An electrical engineer by trade, she danced professionally for the Charlotte Hornet Honeybees, worked out regularly and paid attention to her overall health, her husband said. “She was doing some ballroom dancing, Latin dancing and she was getting ready to do a competition,” said Chris Draft, a former Atlanta Falcon. “But right at the beginning of December 2010, she said she had a little shortness of breath and she went and got checked out.”

The visit to her doctor lead to a diagnosis of a late-stage lung cancer called adenocarcinoma, which begins in the cells that form the lining of the lungs. The condition accounts for just over 30 percent of lung cancer diagnoses, according to statistics from the Lung Cancer Alliance. The finding naturally led to speculation from outsiders about Keasha Draft’s health habits, her husband said.

“That’s the stigma of lung cancer,” Chris Draft said. “Everybody wanted to know if she smoked. They’re trying to figure out how she got it. But she didn’t smoke.”

The presumption that lung cancer is associated with smokers or exposure to second-hand smoke is a dangerous one, said Dr. Scott Kono, an assistant professor of medical oncology at Emory University’s medical school, who treated Keasha Draft.

“Most people are not thought to be victims of cancer, but that they have cancer because of something they did,” he said. “Not all lung cancer patients smoke like the Marlboro Man.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lung cancer kills more people in the U.S. than any other type of cancer and is the second-leading cause of death behind heart disease. More than 20 percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed in people who have never smoked, Ambrose said. “Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in every ethnic group,” she said. “And lung cancer has been the leading cause of death among women and surpassed breast cancer in the late 1980s.”

The five-year survival rate for women with lung cancer was just under 19 percent in 2006, the latest data available from the National Cancer Institute. Other cancers survival rates were significantly higher. “We don’t have a big survivorship and that is why the onus is placed on the families of those who don’t survive,” Kono said. “And that is very hard for families. But what Chris is doing is raising awareness and saying, ‘This is not just a smoker’s disease.’ That is really important.”

While Draft appreciates the acknowledgment, he’s focused on saving lives and changing the face of the disease. He knows what happened to his wife could happen to anyone, whether they have a history of smoking or not.

“She knew it, too,” he said. “That’s why at the wedding she didn’t want gifts. She wanted people to donate to Team Draft.” 

This article was originally published on January 26th, 2012 in Concordiensis, the student newspaper of Union College in Schenectady, New York by Jessica Doran.
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“Smoking kills.” It’s a typical phrase that has been ingrained in the minds of young and old people alike to denote that smoking causes lung cancer. This is very true, but it also causes people to be ignorant as to how lung cancer can affect even those who do not smoke, have never smoked or never even touched a cigarette. This is the case of Tonya Martinez-Hilton, who passed away in December after a battle with lung cancer.

Lung cancer kills 160,000 people a year, and what many do not realize is that these are more lives lost than due to breast, pancreatic and colon cancer. However, the quality of care for lung cancer patients is affected because of the smoking stigma. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, but shortly behind it in causes are radon exposure and genetics. Radon accumulation in a house that rises above a certain level can reek havoc on a persons lungs without them even knowing.

The quality of care that is given to lung cancer patients suffers because it is assumed that they have done this to themselves. But even the effects of secondhand smoke from the previous generations can have damaging repercussions on anyone who comes into its path.

The bottom line is that lung cancer is very rarely caught and stopped in the early stages. It is often not detected until the later stages, when the tumor can have metastasized into a problem that is extremely difficult to eradicate because it has spread to other parts of the body.

Mike Hilton, Tonya’s husband, has made it a personal quest to not only extensively research everything about lung cancer, but to make it a goal that screening and proceedings for detecting the disease are found promptly.

“My wife had a history of lung cancer, but no doctor ever asked her about it or made an effort to get anything checked out,” he said. Chest x-rays alone can detect only large masses, so by the time that is caught, the tumor has probably metastasized. Hilton hopes that CT scans become part of protocol for medical proceedings so that tumors are found early.

Hilton is involved with the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, based in California. They focus on fundraising and grants, and have their own medical research facility. He is their East Coast representative, and has already looked into instituting a program of early lung cancer screenings at Ellis Hospital.

“If we even had one program in Schenectady County, a test run of an early screening program, we could see how the numbers of lung cancers survivors would rise. Visible change could help us to spread the program,” he said.

The foundation is also putting pressure on legislature, particularly the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act, a bill that has not yet been passed but which serves to provide better guidance to medical professionals.

If this money is allocated properly, more funds can be used to support new-age treatments that have shown promise in recent years. Among these, there is new, targeted chemotherapy that affects the receptors within the tumor itself to stop it from growing. In addition to other drugs and vaccines that has been shown to increase life expectancy up to 44 months. Many of these are in the later stages of FDA approval.

However, above all, the future of lung cancer treatment lies in early detection and in stage one diagnosis. Hilton made it clear that he is hoping to see lung cancer treated as a manageable disease within the next few years.

This is where he petitions to the Union community. There are many people on this campus involved in the pre-medical field, with a commitment to achieving true change.

“If they go into the medical field, this is what they need to focus on,” Hilton said. “Your generation are the minds of the future who are going to put horrible diseases like cancer to rest for good.”

Please take a few minutes and watch the video below.

One of the doctors profiled in the story, David Gandara MD, is on the Medical Advisory Board of The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and the molecular research being done at at UC-Davis is one of the research initiatives of ALCMI.  This is some of the work that The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund is supporting with Dancing for Joan!

We need more help!  Get your tickets today and come support this great cause on February 25th - come Dancing for Joan! 

Cal’s Costello Made Each Day Her Best
By Kristen Leigh Porter
Originally published 10/26/2011 on NCAA.org.

Jill Costello’s personal journal outlined six rules to live by:   Love, Live, Be Grateful, Visualize, Laugh, Believe.

"Inspire" could have been added to the list. It describes Costello’s effect on others after her diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer following a promising junior season for the University of California, Berkeley, rowing team. Costello earned a seat as the coxswain for the varsity eight, walked across the stage to receive her college diploma and helped raise money and awareness for the deadliest of cancers. 

She died June 24, 2010, at age 22, less than a month after the Golden Bears finished second at the NCAA Division I Women’s Rowing Championship. 

Costello, one of two winners of the NCAA Inspiration Award, will be recognized in January during the Honors Celebration at the 2012 NCAA Convention in Indianapolis. World War II veteran and former Southern California runner Louis Zamperini is the other honoree.

“Jill was a great inspiration to me and many people because she taught us a simple lesson: you have your best life by making each day your best day, by living it fully and completely and finding the joy in each 24 hours,” her mother Mary Costello said.

The Inspiration award is presented to a current coach or administrator or to a current or former varsity student-athlete who, when confronted with a life-altering situation, used perseverance, dedication and determination to overcome the event and now serves as a role model to give hope and inspiration to others. Herb Benenson, assistant athletic director for athletic communications at Cal, nominated Jill, the 2010 Pac-10 Athlete of the Year, for the award.

The life of the 5-4, 110-pound dynamo was the subject of a number of regional and national attention. ESPN aired an in-depth feature on Jill’s life this past summer and Sports Illustrated published a piece on her last fall. Her life also was highlighted in NCAA Champion magazine.

“Though forced to deal head on with one of the most difficult challenges anyone could ever have to face, Jill found a way to inspire thousands of people across the world with her courage, grace and dignity,” Benenson said. “Not only did her approach to her diagnosis help motivate her teammates, but her story touched – and continues to touch – members of the entire rowing community and beyond.”

Jill’s words to live by are forever etched in the memory of her boyfriend Bryce Atkinson, a former member of the Cal men’s crew team. That final year, they put the cancer aside and lived life like two college kids in love.

 “We didn’t worry about cancer and chemo…That inspired me, now that she’s gone, on how I need to live my life,” Atkinson, 23, said.

That also means carrying on Jill’s mission to beat lung cancer – big time.

Atkinson serves as director of marketing for the Jill’s Legacy Advisory Board, affiliated with the California-based Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation that Jill became involved with following her diagnosis. 

When Jill’s Legacy was officially launched in March 2011, BJALCF namesake Bonnie Addario said she was “inspired and extremely hopeful about the message that these incredible young people can send to the world about lung cancer.” This year alone, $293,000 has been raised through grants and Jog for Jill events, which will fund hand-picked young lung cancer researchers and lung cancer awareness campaigns.

The first out-of-state Jog for Jill event was held September 25 on the Cornell University campus where more than 600 participants raised more than $45,000. Another Jog for Jill is scheduled for Nov.  13 on the Tulsa campus.

Sorority sister and close friend Darby Anderson, a former Cal water polo student-athlete who became a full-time employee of BJALCF in January, said Jill was passionate about changing the stigma of lung cancer and finding a cure for the disease.

Lung cancer is still the number one cancer killer with a 15.5 percent survival rate, Anderson said. People still associate it with smoking, despite the fact that now up to 80 percent of newly diagnosed lung cancer patients never smoked or stopped smoking decades before their diagnosis.
 
“College students especially can really relate to her story because she was so young and very much a ‘normal’ college girl before she was diagnosed,” the 23-year-old Anderson said, noting support from the rowing teams at Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Loyola Marymount. “This is why we have seen so much success at the college level with raising money and awareness for lung cancer.”

The Cal women’s crew team, which took third at the 2011 NCAA championships, celebrated Jill this past season rather than mourning her. The dual with rival Stanford has been renamed “The Jill Row” and the team wears teal and navy tank tops with Jill’s profile on the back instead of the Cal bear for the competition. At the Pac-10 Women’s Challenge in March, Beat Lung Cancer was unveiled as the new varsity eight boat.

“Jill would be honored to receive this award, and I know her family is touched by the recognition,” coach Dave O’Neill said of the NCAA Inspiration Award. “Her strength and resolve was limitless, especially during the most difficult moments. Whether it was racing a tough Stanford crew or battling lung cancer, Jill always gave everything she had.”

Jill will receive the Service Award from the Cal Athletic Hall of Fame next month and introduced with the Hall of Fame class at the home football game vs. Oregon State. Jill's Legacy also will be holding a fundraiser that weekend.

For more information, visit JillsLegacy.org.

by Chris Ballard
Originally published in Sports Illustrated on September 26, 2011

It's been 15 months since Jill Costello lost a yearlong struggle with lung cancer (SI, Nov. 29, 2010). In her final months she helped lead the Cal rowing team to second place at nationals, and since then her courage and strength have continued to inspire.

Shortly after her death Costello's friends and teammates founded Jill's Legacy. The nonprofit funds research through grants it receives and a series of fund-raisers, including an annual Jog for Jill in Berkeley. In addition, the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, for which Costello  worked, holds a series of events partly in her honor.  The most recent, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Sunday, drew 2,000 people and raised more than $300,000.

In May, the Big Row between Cal and Stanford was renamed the Jill Row, and in November she will be inducted into the Cal Athletic Hall of Fame. But her family continues to struggle with the idea that a healthy, nonsmoking 21-year-old could die from lung cancer. "It doesn't get easier to keep reliving it," says her father, Jim Costello, "but you put on the best face you can because you know that's what she wanted. That's why people still come out for her—they saw the spirit she had."