"Six months to a year…We'll make you comfortable." Marguerite heard these life-shattering words 14 years ago when she was told she had lung cancer. She will never forget it. Her doctor told her what she should do…go see her lawyer and take care of her will. But she didn't accept that. She asked for more. She said, "Tell me what else you can do!" Then she learned about clinical trials. Today, at age 64, Marguerite is very much alive and says, "I feel great this week and I have been for a long time." She credits her survival to the clinical trial treatment she received.
Marguerite shared her story. She and her husband Ken moved to Florida 24 years ago after living in Michigan, Texas, and New York. Her job required her to talk on the phone all day. "I would lose my voice periodically and my doctor said to me, when was the last time you had a chest x-ray, and I said I don't think I've ever had one." So, she got the chest x-ray and when she returned home Ken said, "The doctor called and said you have lung cancer and it's really bad." Marguerite was devastated but quickly adopted a can-do attitude, saying "I refused to accept the fact that I was going to die."
Ken shared his story too. "It was very scary at the beginning as they started explaining what they were gonna try to do and I was realizing that if she didn't go through this, she probably wouldn't have any hope whatsoever. Her oncologist made it so much easier just by the way he talked about how they were gonna to do everything they could to save her and he would stand by her from the beginning to the end. It's 14 years later and he's still standing there."
Ken remembers the rough times when he felt a lot of uncertainty and wasn't sure if he could go through it any longer. "She was extremely sick; she lost a lot of weight, was constantly throwing up, and she couldn't stay awake. She was hallucinating a lot during her sleep and there were times I almost wanted her to quit doing it, but I knew this was her only hope so we had to just keep going."
Their hard work paid off. After nine months of treatment on a clinical trial, Marguerite's lung cancer was in remission. Ken thinks the clinical trial was a good decision for them both. Marguerite has some sage advice for others who find out they have lung cancer. "I would say it's a patient-doctor decision to think about a clinical trial. It's something to help the people of today and definitely the ones in the future. People need to step forward and say I'm willing to be your patient and let you do what you feel you have to do to improve the chances of people surviving."
Hear Ken & Marguerite in their own words
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