Battling Cancer

Hello, and thank you to everyone at the HART-Empire Network for making me feel so welcome. I’m Tina, and I have the daunting job of taking over for Lesly Maranan. I have read through all her posts and not only enjoyed them but have learned quite a bit as well.

Battling Cancer addresses a facet of who I am and where I have come from. I suppose the same is true of anyone who is reading the posts. It doesn’t define me, but it has shaped me and continues to guide my life. I am who I am today because of those patients, family members and medical staff who have touched my life. Becoming part of the support team working with someone “battling the monster” cancer is a unique experience. It is an exhaustive and very real give and take.

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Hi everyone!

I’d like to take this time to introduce myself as the new blogger for the Battling for Health: Cancer site.  My name is Lesly, and I’ve spent the last eight years as a research scientist in the area of cancer cell biology and chemotherapeutics. This certainly doesn’t make me an expert in the field, but it did give me a lot of insight on how the science of cancer – the uncontrollable growth of cells caused by faulty signalling within and between them – can unearth new targets for novel treatments.  Incidentally, my wonderful husband is also a physician who specializes in cancer therapies, so I also get to hear a lot about how the treatment of cancer is viewed in a medical setting.

Having this unique prespective has led me to being fascinated by many things — the overwhelming number of people whose lives are affected by cancer in one way or another, the lightning-fast rate of truly exciting discoveries in cancer research, and the perseverance of both the scientific and medical communities to discover, test, and administer new cancer treatments are among them.  But I’m also fascinated by how difficult it can be for the huge pool of people interested in learning about cancer to receive quality information on the newest and most exciting breakthroughs.

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