TALIA ARON, MD, WASN’T ALARMED AT FIRST WHEN SHE STARTED TO FEEL SOME NASTY LOWER BACK PAIN. Last September, the medical director at a telehealth company had been traveling to professional conferences for days, sitting on airplanes and in hard-backed chairs.
But instead of getting better when she returned home to Greensboro, North Carolina, the pain got worse. “Looking back at a picture of me [at a conference] in Nashville, I was kind of a grey color,” Aron said.
By the time she saw her OB-GYN, the pain was so bad that her physician sent her straight to the emergency department in Greensboro.
Doctors at first thought that Aron had a kidney stone or infection. Then she was diagnosed with kidney cancer.
When she sought a second opinion at Duke, she received what would turn out to be the correct diagnosis: a urothelial cancer that had already clawed its way into her kidney. Urothelial cancers include all cancers that grow out of cells that line the bladder and the ureters (tubes that drain urine from the kidneys to the bladder).
Historically, people with advanced urothelial cancer live, on average, for sixteen months, with only 10% surviving five years or more on standard-of-care therapy.
But doctors at Duke had a new treatment in mind for Aron that offered her much better odds. The only problem was, the combination therapy, developed by a medical oncologist at Duke Cancer Institute, was approved at that time only for a select population of patients. She would need help from friends and physicians at Duke and beyond to get the best treatment for her.
