The Liz Army:
A blog
Patient. Patient advocate. Researcher. Student.
There are more than 500 posts here. Use this search to look for something specific. Good luck!
A note about my oldest posts: I began blogging about brain cancer in 2008, at age 29. I had no background or knowledge about healthcare when I started. Please excuse typos and other misconceptions. What you read here is me in real time, like a time capsule.
Defining enthusiasm
I've lobbied Congress on chemo drug parity. I helped start a Twitter community for people with brain tumors. I changed my career to put me in direct connection with leaders in health care. Immediately after my dad's diagnosis I enrolled the two of us in a familial study of gliomas. I obsessed over the release of the 2016 WHO Classifications of Tumors of the Central Nervous System. I declared to anyone who gives a shit that "I am the open source patient," and I am happy to share my personal health information if it would possibly give a researcher a leg up in the study of this disease.
Dear everyone with an oligoastrocytoma: Your diagnosis just changed
As more and more pathologists and doctors begin treating patients based on the genome of their tumor it only makes sense for the WHO to update their classification of CNS tumors. Because science.
Cancer treatment for dummies
As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization only recently classified cancer as "chronic disease," like diabetes and or stroke. This may still sound like a crap sandwich, but it sure beats the previous classification as a "deadly disease".