Rodman native and former cancer patient pens New York Times guest essay
Jun. 24—Kate Pickert, a 1997 graduate of South Jefferson Central School District, Adams, and a Watertown Daily Times reporter from 2001-02, has penned a guest essay in the June 16 edition of The New York Times titled, "Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?"
Ms. Pickert is a journalist and associate professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and the author of "Radical: the Science, Culture and History of Breast Cancer in America," published in 2019.
A New York Times reviewer wrote of the book: "Want to learn more about breast cancer? Read this book ... Pickert has produced an evenhanded, powerful and unflinching page-turner."―
When Ms. Pickert was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2014 at the age of 35, the Rodman native was one of approximately 300,000 women in the U.S. that year who also found out they had the disease. After using her journalistic skills to navigate her own care, she embarked on a quest to understand the cultural, scientific and historical forces shaping the lives of breast-cancer patients in the modern age. She interviewed doctors, economists, researchers, advocates and patients and her journal entries collected over her treatment put a breast cancer diagnosis into context, and shows how modern treatments represent a long overdue shift in the way doctors approach cancer.
In 2019, Ms. Pickert told the Watertown Daily Times, "I wanted to read a book that would tell me the story of breast cancer in America that kind of informed my treatment. No such book existed so I decided to write one."
She was armed with the tools to do so.
Following her employment at the WDT, Ms. Pickert, a SUNY Buffalo graduate, attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City from 2002-03. For a decade, from 2003 to 2013, she worked for New York magazine and then Time magazine. At Time, she covered politics, trends in modern American life and health care.
In her New York Times column, Ms. Pickert writes, "... the landscape for many cancer patients has changed tremendously in just the past five years."
Some patients with cancer that has spread to other parts of their bodies (metastatic), Ms. Pickert writes, "are able to stay alive much longer than previously predicted. Some are cured altogether by new drugs, a reversal of fortune that patients and doctors dared not contemplate just a few years ago."
In more and more cases, Ms. Pickert notes, "patients with metastatic cancer are not cured but now have access to so many treatments that they are able to leap from one to the next, changing course whenever their cancer becomes resistant to a drug, always staying ahead of the disease."
Ms. Pickert writes that her cancer is unlikely to return. In 2019, she told the WDT that she avoids the word "survivor," preferring the term "former breast cancer patient."
"I feel like that word (survivor) has become sort of politicized and a little bit charged," she said in 2019. "The truth is, I'm surviving now. I'm alive. But like I said, there are no guarantees."
In her New York Times column, Ms. Pickert described herself as "extremely fortunate" in her cancer treatment.
"Not just because of the drugs that exist for my type of disease, but also because I had the means to receive my cancer treatment at the University of California, Los Angeles, a large academic medical center," Ms. Pickert writes. "My oncologist is a top researcher who leads clinical trials and is well versed in existing and continuing science relating to my disease. I am also white and have high-quality health insurance. Many cancer patients in America are not so lucky."
To greatly reduce cancer deaths in this country, Ms. Pickert writes, is dependent upon our "ability to combine new cutting-edge science and drugs with a system that allows all patients to benefit from them equally. Focusing on one approach at the expense of the other will leave us stuck making steady but frustratingly incremental progress in the fight against cancer."
