IN THE moment
SURVIVORS SHARE SNAPSHOTS OF THEIR LIVES TODAY
NJ DEVICO & STEVE NOLAN
TITUSVILLE, NEW JERSEY, AND
NEW TO WN, PENNSYLVANIA
Various cancers
Today: DeVico, left, and Nolan
recently published Go Deep, a book
of their paintings and poems. The
fellow artists were brought together
by a mutual acquaintance who
mistakenly thought they had the
same cancer type. In fact, Nolan was
diagnosed with multiple myeloma
at age 62 in 2014, while DeVico has
had numerous cancer diagnoses beginning at age 48 in 2005 and currently has acute
myeloid leukemia. Regardless, Nolan started to write poems in response to DeVico’s
paintings, and DeVico started to paint in response to Nolan’s poems. The resulting book
is “obviously about cancer” but also about life, death, spirituality and relationships,
Nolan says. “This collaboration has been wonderful, and more important than the
collaboration was the friendship that was formed out of it.”
ROSEMARIE ROGERS
RICHTON PARK, ILLINOIS
Stage II breast cancer at age 49 in 1995
Today: Rogers, shown hiking in
South Africa in October 2017, tries
to visit a new country each year.
She also volunteers for the
Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation
as a grant reviewer and for the
University of Illinois Cancer Center
in Chicago as a member of its Patient
Brigade, a group of advocates
who help guide the institution’s
research and community engagement efforts. Rogers says that statistics showing
African-American women are more likely to die from breast cancer than white women
motivate her to volunteer. She aims to encourage minority women to participate in
clinical trials and to spur scientists to do research to help these patients. “I want
to work with the researchers,” she says. “I don’t know if we’ll ever find a cure in my
lifetime, but maybe, possibly ways to manage cancer.”
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JESSICA MELORE
NEW YORK CITY
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma at age 18 in 2000;
Burkitt lymphoma in 2007; Endometrial cancer
of the uterine lining in 2016
Today: As a patient advocate and a motivational speaker,
Melore often travels to events to share her experiences
with cancer. In her downtime, she likes to explore other
countries and has visited China and Iceland. She chose
to spend a recent trip to New Zealand with her parents,
who have been a key part of her support system since she
received her first cancer diagnosis as a teenager. The trio
visited the fjords of the country’s South Island, rode on a
jet boat down the Shotover River and admired glow worms
in the Te Anau caves, to name a few stops on their itinerary.
“Traveling really makes me feel alive,” she says. “If there’s
one thing my experience has taught me, it’s that you need
to make the most of each day and live in the moment, and
that’s why I want to see as much of the world as possible.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF JESSICA MELORE
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