Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller and family at the 2008 Elliot's Legacy event

I got the final diagnosis on April 6th, 2007: non-small cell lung cancer. Stage four. I’d known for days that I had some sort of cancer. I was in bad shape. I was coughing constantly. Back pain made it hard to walk. One thigh was numb. And I was blind in my left eye. But lung cancer seemed absurd. I didn’t fit the profile—I was only 43; I’d been in good health until recently; and I’d never so much as puffed a single cigarette.

Nevertheless, here it was staring me in the face: the diagnosis that kills half its victims within a few months, sixty percent within a year, and the rest in only a few years more. There seemed no hope of living long enough to see my children grow up. There didn’t even seem to be hope of ever feeling well again.

But my story did not follow the statistics. I visited Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where researchers have been studying lung cancer in non-smokers. They’ve found that a relatively new pill, erlotinib (Tarceva®), sometimes works in cases like mine, so my doctor suggested I take it as a first-line therapy, along with some traditional chemo as backup.

Erlotinib worked immediately. Just days after I started taking it, I began to see through my left eye again. The first thing I read with that eye—I’m not making this up—was a street sign for “Clearview Avenue”. After a few more days, I tried going off painkillers, and discovered that the back pain was gone. I haven’t had to take so much as an aspirin for more than a year. And the cough just gradually faded away over the course of a few weeks. I stopped the traditional chemo last August. For almost a year now, I’ve felt essentially fine.

Today, there’s no telling what my future holds. I still have many small tumors, and erlotinib usually stops working after a year or two. But one thing is certain: my immediate past has not been what anyone would have expected when I was diagnosed. Basically, I went to the doctor, he gave me a pill, and I got better.

Cases like mine are not unprecedented, but they are still unusual. My doctors have not concealed their surprise and delight at these results. One of them even used the word “miracle”. But I don’t want my case to be a miracle. Miracles are things that happen only rarely.

I’d rather that my case be a sign—a sign that, after decades of frustration, medical science is finally zeroing in on this disease. It’s not the specific drug I’m taking that matters; it’s the deeper understanding that led to this drug’s development and the matching of the drug with my case.

Now, more than ever, is the time to press the effort. It’s the time to deepen that understanding: to test the new treatments it leads to, to study how they work in combination, to learn how to predict which drugs will work best on which patients. With this understanding, there’s a real chance stories like mine can become not miraculous, but commonplace.

-Matt Miller
Lung Cancer Survivor