Day 81!! Here is Fed Bernal he shares his ballsy story with us today! Definitely a must read and like :) I am a cancer chemical biologist, and I currently run a research group where we design and synthesize compounds to study cancer cells, find out what makes them tick, and develop smarter and more efficient ways to attack them. Cancer research is fascinating, and figuring out all the tricks cancer cells use to evade treatment is certainly a challenging, but rewarding endeavor. I never imagined, though, that such training would come in handy for seemingly unrelated reasons. On November 22, 2006, the day before Thanksgiving, I woke up with a backache which I chalked up to both a hockey injury I sustained in college and lugging my then 1.5-year-old daughter all over the place. I popped a couple of pain killers and made my way to the lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Later that day, I was sitting in front of the mass spectrometer checking out some data when the ache resurfaced. I was a bit perplexed about the origin of the pain, and in what turned out to be a “eureka” moment, I realized the pain was actually coming from my right testicle which had shrunk in size and was as hard as a rock –definitely not a good sign. I went next door to the ER where a scrotal ultrasound revealed four solid masses inside “righty”, and was told by the urologist on call that the testicle would have to come out. One of the things that came to mind, which was truly surreal, was that I would be trading the lab coat for a hospital gown. In a sense, being a cancer researcher helped me understand what was going on inside my body. What no one told me was the little number cancer does to a patient’s psyche –you just don’t learn that stuff in graduate school. I could “reason” my way through the treatment options and the possible outcomes, but it was truly hard to grasp the fear that comes with facing one’s own mortality no matter how favorable is the diagnosis. I have now been cancer-free for over 7 years, and if there is one good thing that has come out of this journey is that it sparked the desire to get busy living and challenge myself to do the most with the time I have. My latest craze has been running. I used to be sprinter when I was in high school, and now I am finding myself running long distance races with the Boston Marathon on tap in a few weeks (check out rundfmc.org/2014/fedbernal). It is things like these that make me feel full of life and that my work here isn’t done. My name is Fed, I am a cancer research geek, and I am ballsy.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 16:00:26 +0000