ASTROnews: U.S. Marine a leader on the battlefield and in the waiting room

Gunnery Sgt. Edward Schrank accepted the fact that he may die young when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps 13 years ago.

“At some point being a Marine, you accept the fact that you’re in a profession that puts your life in great danger, and you’re OK with that because it’s what you want to do,” Schrank said. “Being aware of your own mortality is something that most Marines are familiar with.”

However, he had no idea that it would be cancer putting his life at the greatest risk, not the battlefield.

In December 2006, the 30-year-old Marine was diagnosed with lacrimal adnal carcinoma, a rare tumor of the tear duct.

He said his initial diagnosis was a shock, but three years later he is cancer-free and giving back to the community through his support organization, C.STAR. His dedication to helping fellow cancer patients is the reason he was chosen as the 2009 Survivor Circle Award winner. Schrank was honored at the Awards Ceremony at the 51st Annual Meeting in Chicago and presented with a trophy and a $1,000 prize.

Diagnosis
“I don’t think I could really comprehend [my diagnosis]; I think it took me a while,” he said. “I worried about it interrupting my career; I worried about all these things that don’t matter.”

Shortly after his diagnosis, Schrank began what would end up being three years’ worth of treatments. He had surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago in an effort to remove the tumor while saving his eye, but after the surgery positive margins remained.

The next step was a choice between radiation immediately or removing the eye and all associated tissue and following that with radiation. Schrank decided to have his eye removed and then radiation.

“The traumatic thing was losing my eye – according to the doctors,” he said. “Honestly, that really wasn’t that hard for me to do. It just felt like, ‘you mean all you have to do is take my eye and I get to live? Take it.’ … there are a lot of Marines who end up losing body parts and limbs and things, and this didn’t seem to be as major as people I know who have had more serious injuries than that.”

Schrank had a six-week course of IMRT after his eye was removed, which was initially determined to be successful. Ten months later, another tumor was discovered outside of the initial field of radiation; it was within 5 mm of his brain stem. Receiving IMRT again was not an option.

“To cover the area again without overlapping the fields would have been almost impossible,” Schrank said.

He began doing his own research on treatments and discovered the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute in Bloomington, Ind., where he contacted Medical Director Allan Thornton, M.D.

“From what Dr. Thornton has told me, it was the most complicated case he has ever done,” Schrank said.

Schrank moved to Bloomington for nine weeks in late 2008 with the help of his family. He handed over responsibility for his move to his brother and showed up in Bloomington to a furnished apartment complete with Christmas decorations and a stocked fridge.

“My family, they’d been waiting for years to help me,” he said. “They really stepped up on that one. At that point we were clicking as a team.”

In September 2009, Schrank learned that his proton treatments were successful and as of today he is cancer-free.

“I take [being cured] with a grain of salt,” he said. “The concept of cured doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to mean. I’m not trying to be cured; I’m trying to die of something else. If I can hold cancer off for another 40 years – that’s fine.”

Volunteering
While in Bloomington, Schrank began informal outreach to the patients in the waiting room, mostly the parents of pediatric cancer patients.

“I just talk,” he said. “I never shut up.”

He was there every day and waiting with the same people, so he began speaking with them and sharing stories about treatments and cancer survivorship. Eventually he started coming into the waiting room when he didn’t have appointments and reaching out to new groups of cancer patients and their friends and families.

“Radiation is where it started to feel like a community to me,” Schrank said.

Schrank said that after talking to the parents of so many young cancer patients at the proton center and because of his own experiences with family and friends worrying about him throughout his treatments, he realized that it is critical to not only support a patient but to support a patient’s support system, too.

In response, he developed a Web site called Survivor Team to give cancer survivors and their caregivers a place to organize patient and support team outreach efforts. According to the site, survivor teams are the people who comprise the support system for cancer survivors.

“I’ve been through so much with my support team, made a lot of mistakes with my support team, figured it all out from scratch,” he said. “When you learn something, if you don’t give it away, then it doesn’t amount to much.”

Once he moved back to Chicago he continued his outreach by visiting the waiting rooms at Lurie Cancer Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center Cancer Center weekly and, through his Web site, began organizing outreach efforts in the community.

The original people he spoke to in the waiting rooms became his first Survivor Team volunteers, and the group began showing up at events together, such as weekend festivals throughout Chicago, to pass out literature on cancer organizations.

C.STAR
Over time the needs of the organization grew and Survivor Team evolved into C.STAR, a new organization with two main functions: team building and resource management.

According to its site, C.STAR is “a revolutionary new concept in cancer support. We are an online community dedicated to Cancer Survivor Teams, Activism, and Resources.”

C.STAR officially kicked off and launched a new Web site, designed entirely by its community of volunteers, on November 2, 2009, during ASTRO’s meeting.

The Web site features a resource manager to plug in information about yourself and in turn it creates a list of resources based on your needs. This feature is only available for certain cities now, but the list is expanding. Schrank personally visits each city before it is launched on the site to distribute flyers to hospitals and care facilities and visit support organizations.

“The whole point is to build an online community,” Schrank said. “Not just people with cancer, but moms and sons and a teacher with a student who has cancer can go to the Web site and find someone else there.”

He also hopes to get doctors involved with the site.

“I have a lot of respect for my doctors,” he said. “If you’re a doctor and your sole purpose professionally is to help the sick get well, then this organization can help you with that.”

Ultimately, Schrank said he wants to spread his message of survivorship through C.STAR and continue living his life as a cancer survivor. He said he defines a survivor as 24 hours after diagnosis because “you’ve made it that day.”

“I used to feel like I can’t wait to put this behind me,” Schrank said. “Now I am totally OK with the fact that that will never happen. I will never put this behind me. This will be a part of my life, no matter how long that is, this will be a part of my life forever.”

For more information on C.STAR, visit www.cancer-star.org.

–Nicole Napoli, Publications Specialist

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