September Miles: For Dr. Linda T. Vahdat
Photo Credit: The Laurus Project
Before we kick off this month’s Why We Run blog post, we wanted to give our Cookie’s Cause followers a fundraising update. We’re less than $1,500 from our $8,000 target! We’re hoping to surpass our goal by October 30, 2020: Cookie’s birthday, and the day Justine is running the NYC Virtual Marathon. You can find our donation page on Fred’s Team HERE, and please remember that every donation, no matter how small, gets us that much closer to imagining a world without cancer–especially in this final push. We can’t thank everyone enough for their outpouring of love and ongoing support, and we’re honored to be on this journey together.
If you haven’t seen on our social media posts, we’re also excited to announce that Cookie’s Cause was featured on Episode 1 of the New York City Marathon’s new YouTube series “Long Runs, Short Stories: A Virtual Marathon Journey.” We enjoyed working with the New York Road Runners organization, and we’re incredibly grateful they allowed us to share our story. You can watch the full episode HERE, with our Cookie’s Cause feature starting at 5:25.
For September, we dedicated our miles to one of Cookie’s doctors, Dr. Linda T. Vahdat, Chief of Medical Oncology and Clinical Director of Cancer Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center, Norwalk Hospital. As fate would have it, Dr. Vahdat’s father was actually Cookie’s pediatrician growing up, so she knew right off the bat she was in good hands after being diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
With over 20 years of experience caring for people with cancer, Dr. Vahdat and her research team have been working diligently to find new therapies to help manage the spread and symptoms of high risk for recurrence breast cancers, specifically TNBC. One of these new groundbreaking therapies is the copper depletion compound tetrahiomolybdate (TM), which our mom was able to access per the suggestion of Dr. Vahdat, and under the guidance of her intelligent-beyond-belief integrative oncologist Dr. Mark Rosenberg (www.newhopeforcancer.org). Based on initial research, it has already become clear this drug is essential to the survival of patients with TNBC.
TNBC is a very difficult cancer to treat in that estrogen, progesterone, and the HER-2 gene are not present in the cancer tumor, and are therefore not able to be targeted by generic treatments. By identifying successful methods for targeting the biological environments that tumors need to grow and spread through the use of TM, Dr. Vahdat and Dr. Rosenberg have truly revolutionized the fight against breast cancer.
If you met our mom between June 2015 and October 2019, the only thing that would have tipped you off to her diagnosis was her short, coarse hair, which had grown back that way because of the toxic, FDA-approved chemotherapy regimens that are somehow still—more than 50 years later—the treatments with some of the largest evidence-base for treating cancer. And if you met her during that time, you’d know that the only things that made her uncomfortable were the nausea, fatigue, and lethargy which followed chemotherapy.
But you’d also know how remarkably resilient and unimaginably informed she was, so it came as no surprise to us when she actively sought out other options for managing her cancer. When Cookie read about the results from initial clinical trials of TM, she knew it was her best chance, and did everything she could to make sure it was something she could access. While it was undoubtedly the TM that improved her prognosis, the need for additional research is stalling thousands of women’s chance of survival.
We can’t imagine what it would’ve been like if our mom hadn’t been able to receive TM. TNBC alone is such a heart-breaking and frightening disease, and the thought of not being able to continue receiving a drug that was clearly saving her would have absolutely crushed my mom and our family. It is critical that doctors continue to research this compound, especially given the momentum they already have in making TNBC a manageable disease.
Thank you to Dr. Vahdat and Dr. Rosenberg for being a part of the miracles we witnessed, and to the countless intelligent minds who are fighting every day so that women like Cookie don’t have to. We didn’t choose the pain of TNBC, but we did choose the purpose, and we were absolutely honored to dedicate our miles to this cause. 100% of donations we receive as part of Fred’s Team will go directly to Dr. Vahdat’s research, which will make TM more accessible and TNBC more manageable for women everywhere. Not one more woman should have to die from this disease–this can’t wait.
To read more about Dr. Vahdat and her incredible work, awards and honors, as well as publications, please visit the following websites:
And please check out the innovative approach to treatment being studied at the Rosenberg Integrative Cancer Treatment and Research Institute: http://www.newhopeforcancer.org.
“Waiting for funding to come from big pharma or grants isn’t an option when women who would potentially benefit from our work are dying while we wait.” —Dr. Linda Vahdat