Monday, August 06, 2007
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Staff photo by David Leamingfrom the Kennebec Journal
Finding shelter for those who serve their nation
Immigrant recalls her special greeting
State gains $85M in Homeland Security funds
Man arrested after swerve toward cop
School unit in limbo
Rain? What rain?
LEE LATCHES ON WITH THOMAS
Modern camping equipment takes it to the extreme
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Civil War-era flag finds honored position
Residents wonder if the rain will ever go away
FAIRFIELD Sewage plant rejection irks man
Winslow's fireworks guy doesn't mind the obscurity
At holiday derby, the fun is catching
Vets' champion 'very passionate' about her work
Hersom deals with change
Sandals work for outdoor types
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from the Morning Sentinel
"Everyone in the building has something on here and the two secretaries put it together," Kane said.
There, right in the middle, is a family photo. Surrounding it, a pattern of drawings, scripture and poems offer gentle encouragement. There, written in John Hancock lettering, are the words Faith, Hope and Love. Kane clings to these.
The students at staff at Warsaw Middle School gave the quilt to Kane in June, just a few months after she learned she had Stage IV lung cancer and might not return to teach a 20th year.
The quilt and the binders full of passages of loving phrases and pictures her seventh and eighth-grade students gave her were all designed to do one thing: Give Kane hope in the face of hopelessness.
"If anything bad has to happen to you, (Warsaw) is the place for it to happen," Kane says. "I've been so blessed throughout this whole thing."
At 53, and facing a cancer that kills 85 percent of the people it afflicts within five years, Kane sees blessings all around her. They are in her faith in God, whom she knows answers prayers; they overflow at Warsaw; and they are in the family that will cancel everything just to be near her.
And those blessings have come in the form of a little pill that Kane takes every morning. It was a one-in-a-million chance, landing a spot in a study on Tarceva's effectiveness against her particular kind of cancer, and Kane is going to make the most of it.
"I know my life will be shortened, but I still have things to do in this life," Kane says.
AN ANNOYING COUGH
She still remembers how silly she felt for making an appointment to see the doctor for a cough.
"We live in Maine; it's the middle of winter; I have a cough," she recalls saying to dismiss the pleas of those who urged her to get checked out. Kane had always been the picture of health.
But there were pains as well, like the back ache after attending a two-day conference in February and the cranky hip after taking care of her grandchildren. She dismissed both as easily as the cough.
When Kane finally saw her on Feb. 15, the doctor asked how Kane was feeling.
"I said I was doing great, but by the way, I have this annoying cough," Kane says.
The next day Kane was back at the hospital getting a scan, and the radiologist said it looked like Kane's lung belonged to a heavy smoker. The next day she had a cat scan.
"My life's been in the fast lane ever since."
BETTER THAN CANCER
Neither the doctor, nor Kane, thought the shading was lung cancer. Kane had never smoked. Her home was not filled with Radon and she worked in one of the safest environments possible. Doctors introduced Kane to the first of many new words she would learn: Sarcoidosis, tiny, lumpy granules on the lung.
"In my journal I wrote, 'It's a lung disease, but it's certainly better than lung cancer,'" Kane recalls. "I certainly never expected it to be cancer."
The lung specialist she saw on March 5, however, ordered a biopsy. Within an hour he determined it was cancer.
"I said, 'OK, it's cancer. I'm hungry, lets go to the Governors for breakfast,'" Kane says.
She was never scared until March 13, when the oncologist she saw in Bangor diagnosed Kane with advanced, non-small cell lung cancer, Adenocarcinoma. Kane was Stage IV. She had done enough research beforehand to know it was virtually untreatable.
"She said, 'You have lung cancer," Kane recalls. "Then she said it's Stage IV. That's when it felt like someone had punched me in the gut."
Her husband, Gregory "Dewey" Kane, fell apart. "She is the love of my life," Gregory Kane says. "When the news first hit, I was devastated. I sat in the seat and thought, 'What is this?'"
Kane's options included chemotherapy and, when the pain got too bad, radiation. The oncologist pulled Kane's scans up on the computer.
The cancer showed up in bright spots. Both lungs, her spine, legs and hip lit up like a Christmas tree.
"She said the average Stage IV cancer patient lives 8-12 months," Kane recalled.
HOPE
Kane was determined to be positive from the moment she got the diagnosis. Only 15 percent of the people who develop lung cancer live five years, but Kane was going to be one of them. All she could think about was telling her family.
"It was really important to me to present a positive outlook to the people I had to talk to," Kane says. "If I could have come through without anybody knowing, I would have done it, but I knew I needed people and prayers. I didn't want to become the focus of anybody's life."
Kane met with oncologists at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston on March 20. They verified the Stage IV diagnosis, but that's not all.
"They said you are a perfect candidate for this chemical trial," Kane recalls. "They were so excited. This was the first time I cried because they were giving me hope. Before, all the hope had come from within me."
Tarceva has already been approved for use, but only in conjunction with chemotherapy. The current study by a cooperative of northeastern hospitals is to determine if Tarceva can be used as a replacement for traditional chemotherapy, said Dr. Panos Fidias, oncologist at the cancer center.
Kane was an ideal candidate because she had never smoked and was otherwise in good health. She was selected as one of 15 people from New England and 180 nationwide to take part in the study. Kane was even fortunate enough to be randomly selected to take Tarceva without traditional chemotherapy.
Before she went to Boston, doctors had gently prodded Kane to prepare for death. At Massachusetts General Hospital, however, they urged her to keep living.
"You don't want your body to think for a moment that you're giving up," she said, adding she is working towards a doctorate degree.
"I've given up a few things, but I've decided I can't give up teaching. I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother, but teaching is my soul."
MIRACLE
Kane met a former student a few months ago. The young man came up to her, crying, sad to think the teacher who had changed his life was losing hers.
"I didn't expect you to look so good," Kane recalls him saying. "I'll treasure that moment forever. People will come up to me and say, 'Are you sure they didn't make a mistake.'"
Within two weeks of taking the Tarceva, Kane's cough was gone. Her eight brothers and sisters gathered at the end of March, presumably to say good-bye, but by the end of the weekend they were teasing her about not being so nice to Kane the next time they all get together.
Kane had another appointment in Boston in May.
"It looked like someone had taken an eraser and started erasing all these spots," Kane says.
Kane's only side effect has been a minor rash and brief bouts of minor upset stomach.
"She was the beneficiary of what the treatment had to give her and she didn't pay a heavy price," Fidias says. "You cannot look at her and think, 'Oh my God, she has an untreatable lung cancer."
"It's been a miracle," Gregory says.
MOVING ON
Kane has to go to Boston every three weeks to get checked out and to get treatment to strengthen her bones against the holes the cancer has cut. Her most recent visit revealed that the cancer is now stable.
The cancer is still there, but as it is, Kane can view it as a chronic illness that she will always need to treat. Someday the cancer may resist the Tarceva treatment, but by then other treatments may be available. There is already research to overcome resistance, Fidias says.
However long she has left, Kane wants to live as a wife, mother and teacher, not a cancer patient.
"Right now, I look in the mirror and see a cancer patient staring back at me," she says. "I don't want to do that anymore. Now that I know my cancer is stable, I'm going to treat it like a chronic disease. It's a part of me, bit I can't let the cancer take over my life."
Craig Crosby--861-9253
ccrosby@centralmaine.com
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