Live Strong: Inspirational Stories from Cancer Survivors-from Diagnosis to Treatment And Beyond

"I am somebody with cancer and I am somebody without cancer." SAMANTHA EISENSTEIN I became a survivor when I was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma in December of 1999. I went down to New York for treatment and started in January of 2000. Treatment went through September of 2000 with seven rounds of high-dose chemo and surgery. The tumor was in my leg, in the tibia. I spent about four months at home afterward, September through December, recovering with physical therapy. I was a senior in college when I was diagnosed and only had one semester left. I went back to school in January of 2001 and was always tired, always bruising, and always catching everything that was going around. Because of the high-dose chemo that I got, I kept going in for tests, but the doctors just kept saying, "Your bone marrow is tired. It'll start working. It's just working slowly." Finally, I went in for a bone-marrow biopsy in April of 2001 and they found the secondary myelodysplastic syndrome, which is one of the precursors to leukemia. I said to them, "If there is anything I can be doing from now until May when I graduate, I'll do it, but otherwise, leave me alone. I want to go back to school." I knew that the search for a bone-marrow donor could be long and drawn out. They said that was fine. So I went back and graduated from college in May of 2001. I started chemo again in June or July to get the disease back into remission, because it had started to progress. I was home for a couple of weeks and they found a perfect donor match for me. All they told me was that he was young and male. I found out later he's from St. Louis, but I haven't met him yet. I underwent the bone-marrow transplant in August of 2001, was in the hospital for three months, spent the nine months afterward going in for tests and medications and anti-rejection and anti-everything drugs, and finally in June of 2002, they said, "Okay. You're set. Go do your thing." So I went up to graduate school at Middlebury College for the summer and moved to Boston in September of 2002. I started working for a public-health-education nonprofit where we do mostly HIV-prevention research, and interventions and violence prevention. Then last year I went to the I'm Too Young for This symposium that was held at MIT. It was the first time I even found out that there were other young-adult survivors, because in a hospital like the one I was treated in, sadly, nobody ever really left. All of my friends had passed away. I didn't have any people that I went through treatment with who made it long enough to go through the survivorship journey with me. Since I finished, I had been struggling with my appearance and scars, all the issues that are not the day-to-day chemo stuff and therefore didn't feel legitimate. But I went to that conference and saw that there was a whole community of people like me out there. The keynote speaker talked about how he gets approached by so many survivors who say, "I need to quit my job. I don't know what I want to do, but this is where I want to be." And I realized that's exactly how I felt. So my friend Bridget and I started talking about organizing a benefit concert for young-adult survivors to help them transition out of treatment and into the "real world." We started doing research and found that there aren't any organizations designed to provide educational scholarships, professional training, and advice on rent, loans, car payments, grocery and residual medical bills for young-adult survivors. But instead of being discouraged and giving up completely, we gave up the idea of the benefit concert and just decided to go full steam ahead and create our own organization. It's called Surviving and Moving Forward. It's called the SAM Fund for young adult survivors of cancer. I feel uncomfortable saying, "I'm Sam, and this is the SAM Fund," because though it did start obviouslyLance Armstrong Foundation Staff is the author of 'Live Strong: Inspirational Stories from Cancer Survivors-from Diagnosis to Treatment And Beyond' with ISBN 9780767921381 and ISBN 0767921380.