Every Friday morning in the glorious, high desert town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a 77-year-old retired nurse is being treated at a community cancer center for metastatic breast cancer. Stricken with a form of the disease in 1984 that had migrated to her lymph nodes, she underwent a unilateral mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy and anti-hormonal therapy. She was lucky–and a beneficiary of late-20th century surgery, medicine and drug development–living another 30 years cancer-free. At the end of her diverse nursing career in hospitals and private medical practices in northern New Jersey, she was running clinical trials of drugs for HIV/AIDS patients.
