Dear Mr. Iaconesi
Thank you for accepting my friend request (and my mom’s). I wanted to get in touch with you about your amazing cancer journey. My name is XXXXXXXX and I am 17 (as of last week) and in 11th grade in New York City. I’m also an active member of TEDYouth, an amazing group that I know from the CNN story that you are a part of as well.
More important, I have been working as a volunteer and “buddy” to kids with brain cancer since I was seven and a friend of mine also adopted from China (I was adopted from China when I was six months old) was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), brainstem cancer. As a tribute to her, I decided to volunteer to work with other sick kids. I’ve worked with over 100 kids in the past almost ten years, all over the USA and won the New York Liberty Medal for my work. That’s not really important at all. What is important is what I learned.
I learned that children and adults with cancer are simply children and adults with the same concerns, joys and challenges that people who don’t have cancer have. I learned that part of the cure is to treat others exactly for who they are: people. I’m really happy to say that some of the children I have worked with over the years have totally recovered and are NED and have gone on to do what they are meant to do: live their lives as I hope you will too. I think the idea of reaching out to everyone for ideas on treatment and cure is wonderful!!!
My journey into trying to become someone who is part of that cure has led me to amazing places. Most recently it has led me to to work as a research assistant during my high school summers and during the year in a neuroscience lab at Mt Sinai Medical School in New York where I am working on a multi year project and paper with three MD/PhD supervisors on the late effects of chemotherapy on neurons in the brain. I know already that I am pre-med and hope to attend medical school after college and go into pediatric neurosurgery. I don’t know if this will be of help, but with permission from my supervisors, I am happy to share my research with you. After two years, we are only up to the immunohistology phase in a blind study but the lab is full of people working all the time on what is essentially treatment and cure for cancer. In this case, treatment’s late effects.
Mostly I just wanted to offer my support and tell you that I will be keeping my eyes wide open for any information I can pass onto you. I know there is a cure for brain cancer out there and I know it’s going to be found. I hope I can be part of it.
On a completely different note, I am a nationally ranked American sabre fencer and Italy is the home of some of the best fencers and fencing in the world so I and my sabre peers follow Italian fencing all the time! Bravo!
Only the best,
