|
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
|
|
I was raised with two brothers and a sister on a small farm in Wisconsin. My curiosity about living things was stimulated at an early age because I was always in touch with life, whether it be a growing stalk of corn, an annoying weed striving for recognition, a newborn calf staggering to cuddle up to its mother, or those pesky mice and rats in the corn crib. Little did I know at the time just how important these animals eventually would be in my life. When I moved to the big city, I embarked on a new kind of life with new experiences - marriage and children. My strong ties to the farm of my youth enabled me to impart my respect of animals and nature to my children. Later, a move to a new home on a lake once again brought my family and me close to nature - this time to frogs, fish, snakes and creepy-crawly things. In 1979, our family moved to Houston. I had worked only a few months in a medical center when I began to experience pain in my neck, then in my back. After many tests and visits to numerous specialists, I was diagnosed in January 1982 with breast cancer with metastasis in four locations on my spine. The treatment - radiation followed by chemotherapy - was not easy for the active person that I was. At one point, I was given six months to live if I could not tolerate the chemotherapy regimen. Following a month in the hospital, I was sent home and made subsequent regular visits to the doctor’s office for intravenous chemotherapy. During recuperation, I can honestly say that healing my body, mind, and soul was the center of my concentration. I spent countless hours each day in solitude as I visually scanned my body inch by inch and projected the image of a totally healed being. Within six months, I gradually regained my sapped strength and returned to work in September 1982 on a modified schedule. I finally became strong enough to continue my career in research administration at a leading cancer institute. My responsibilities involved supervising the administrative approval process for human subjects, animals, grants and regulator issues. As a result, I became interested in how animals were being used in research - the species, procedures, the investigators’ responsibilities, etc. - and how this whole scenario related to my past experiences. I realized the animals being used in research weren’t the same as those "pesky mice and rats" I remembered from my years on the farm; in fact, I came to understand that they were not "pesky" at all as I gained new respect for their value. At this point, I was able to concentrate less on myself and began to examine the various roles these creatures had played in my life. As I look back, I can see that had it not been for a certain animal (for some reason I believe it was a rat or mouse) enduring scientific tests of a chemotherapeutic agent, you would not be reading this article today. I have not double that thousands of people who have suffered through major diseases and lived to tell their stories are thankful that an animal was used to test the modality involved in their therapy. I know that research advances would be slowed without the involvement of species closely resembling man on which to test new therapies. It makes me wonder if it was God’s plan to create a fast-reproducing species such as the mouse so that researchers would not be delayed in their experiments at some point due to a lack of test media. My life today is wonderful, even though there have been a couple of major setbacks indirectly related to cancer. But there is a settling reassurance that whatever may happen to me, my friend the mouse has guided responsible researchers to a diagnosis and treatment for my particular kind of cancer, and has done so for thousands of other people with major illnesses. The value of animals in research has been made much clearer to me since suffering a major illness and having the opportunity to discover the origin of my treatment. I’m thankful for being able to understand as I look back. |
| iiFAR P.O. Box 27454 Lansing, MI 48909 Phone: (517) 887-1141 Fax: (517) 887-1710 |
 |
|
Images and Text Copyright ©1999 iiFAR Images and Layout Copyright ©1999 Kevin Brawley |