When Andy Sutton was 7 years old, he opened a greeting card sent from his aunt. His parents, not expecting the message written inside, asked him to read it aloud. The unfamiliar words were “deepest condolences” – Sutton’s dad had been diagnosed with colon cancer.
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Sutton. “I didn’t know what cancer was. I just knew right then it’s not anything good.”
Sutton, now a Weinberg freshman, is one of almost 600 students on more than 50 teams participating in Relay for Life, an annual event supporting the American Cancer Society. Participants take turns walking the track at the Sports Pavilion and Aquatics Center for 12 hours while their teammates camp out to symbolize that cancer never sleeps.
So far, NU has raised more than $21,000. At this year’s May 13 Relay, Sutton said he will honor his father, who died a year and a half after being diagnosed.
“Ever since then, it’s had this lasting effect,” he said. “Until I was 16 I always stuck to the idea that there was a reason for it. I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me, and then I remember I was walking in the halls, just a random day in high school, and I stopped walking and thought, ‘I need to find the cure for cancer. I don’t know how, but I’m going to do it.”’
Sutton started by getting involved with Relay in high school and later by shaving his head for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, an organization that supports cancer research for children. At NU, he joined the survivorship and advocacy committee for Relay, tasked with aiding the cancer survivors that will attend. As a chemistry major, Sutton said he hopes to study how carcinogens and other environmental effects can cause cancer.
Cancer research, his friends tell him, is “a noble thing,” but Sutton said his career aspirations and participation in Relay for Life are more about personal closure than heroism.
“It’s just what I need to do for myself,” he said. “It’s not, ‘What is the most intelligent thing I could do with my life?’ It’s, ‘What could I do so I could finally say goodbye to my dad, and hello to the rest of my life?'”
Like Sutton, Weinberg freshman Christine Oh is a member of the survivorship and advocacy committee. Oh’s father died her freshman year of high school from lung cancer. The doctor, crying, had told her father he would only survive a few months, Oh said.
“If you saw him, you wouldn’t have guessed that he had cancer because he really tried to fight it,” Oh said. “My father, when he puts his mind to something, he’s really, really stubborn.”
Oh said her father was heavily involved in the fight against cancer, seeking out experimental drugs. He beat the odds set by his doctor and lived for another two and a half years. She said she decided to join Relay for Life to carry on her father’s battle.
“Most people are affected by cancer somehow,” she said. “Even if we can’t cure cancer, just finding ways for families to have less pain will affect a lot of people.”
Weinberg junior Melissa Miller recognizes the importance of care even without a cure. On Miller’s birthday last year, her grandmother died after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
“She was actually very lucky, and even though there isn’t a cure for pancreatic cancer she was able to receive the best treatment possible,” Miller said. “The fact that that’s not the case for everyone is one reason I’m involved. Anything I can do to prevent it from happening to people in the future or making their experience with the disease as positive as it can be is something I’m definitely committed to.”
A Relay for Life participant since her freshman year, Miller is now on the team mentorship committee, acting as a liaison for each team captain. While she said she tries not to dwell on her grandmother’s suffering, she remembers how difficult it was to hear about her deteriorating condition while she studied far away from her California home.
“Unfortunately, she got worse when I got to college and it was hard to bring myself to call her,” Miller said. “I didn’t really want to deal with the fact that she was sick, and it was hard not knowing how fast it was going to progress.”
Bienen junior Matthew Lee is all too familiar with the disease’s progression – he said he watched colon cancer alter his father’s body for almost five years when chemotherapy treatment gave his father mood swings and hair loss. But the most harrowing memory of his father’s condition, Lee said, came after his father went to California to undergo several months of acupuncture treatment. Lee said he and his mother traveled for three and a half days by train to bring his father back home to New Jersey because he had become too weak to fly.
“By that time, he was just so weakened that he was like a new person,” Lee said. “His legs got really thin and he had trouble breathing. He would have frequent seizures because it was a really developed stage – it had spread to more than just his colon. He didn’t have any hair. He couldn’t stand up. He was in a wheelchair. He had an oxygen tank by his bed in the train.”
For the rest of his life, Lee’s father mostly stayed in hospice. Every day after school, Lee walked to the hospital to be with his father and do homework or just watch him sleep. Lee said his father encouraged him to study oncology. But Lee also realized he could promote cancer research in another way: Relay for Life. He has walked and worked on a committee ever since coming to NU. This year, he is a co-chair for the recruitment committee, enlisting other students in a war he said he believes is winnable.
“I think cancer in itself, it seems like such a daunting field,” Lee said. “People think that once you hear the words ‘It’s cancer,’ that it’s a death sentence, but I don’t think that’s the case. Research is so vital to understanding this disease and developing treatments that are less damaging than chemotherapy, that actually work. I think we’re pretty much on the edge of making that breakthrough.”
