Ken Festa

In 2019, I was driving back to NYC from the University of Delaware with my wife, Natalie. We'd just dropped our son off for the spring semester. I put my hand on my neck, felt a lump, and said, "hm, I should probably get that checked out." Natalie, who is a nurse practitioner by training (in fact, she worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering for 15 years) emphatically agreed.

So began a series of sonograms, biopsies, and scans that culminated in a diagnosis of follicular lymphoma (FL). It was upsetting news, but not devastating. FL is incurable--even after a successful treatment, it always returns (kinda like the bad guy in the Halloween movies). But it IS treatable. So with my oncologist at Mt. Sinai, we settled on a treatment plan: six months of chemo and immunotherapy, followed by 2 years of immunotherapy. The big idea is to keep the cancer away for at least two years. For some reason, if it returns within 2 years, it's much more intractable and can become much more aggressive.

At the time I'd already signed up to do the NYC marathon for the 19th time. It's something I love to do--it just sums up everything about my home town that I love. It's tens of thousands of athletes and hundreds of thousands of spectators coming together to celebrate the greatest city in the world.

Realizing that chemotherapy would largely need to coincide with marathon training, my first reaction was one of disappointment. You can't do chemo while training for a marathon. Right?

And then I realized that this was just an assumption, and maybe not a true one. While scouring the internet for stories about people who run while going through cancer treatment, I learned about Gabriele Grunewald (https://www.bravelikegabe.org/). Gabe fought a deadly cancer while competing at the highest levels of track and field, continuing to shine while outliving her prognosis by years. She ultimately lost her fight with cancer, but her story continues to inspire people--it sure inspired me!

So, that settled it. The first few chemo treatments wiped me out, but we eventually got it figured out. Some of the nurses wanted me to scale back the training, but you cannot do a marathon on 5-mile training runs and my doctor said, "Hey, it's what he does!" It wasn't easy, but I kept going, and I managed to cross the finish line, trudging past the Tavern on the Green in Central Park on the first Sunday of November that year. It wasn't my fastest time, but it was one of the most meaningful marathons I've ever done. First place in that category is the one I did with Natalie way back in 1998.

So, I'm doing well. I'm still in remission, and will have my last immunotherapy treatments this winter. I'm in training for the NYC marathon again, hoping to finish it for the 20th time. But I know that not everyone is doing well. Follicular lymphoma comes back--always-- and it can sometimes transform into more dangerous and deadly forms of lymphoma. So I'm joining Team-in-Training for the third time (first time as a cancer patient) as a way of reaching back to help my fellow blood cancer warriors. I'm sure that we can find a cure for FL (and all blood cancers) in my lifetime!