Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. ~Desiderius Erasmus
CancerHawk is about giving light to cancer patients and their caregivers. Started by Robyn Stoller in 2011, CancerHawk is Robyn’s way of sharing the knowledge that she gained on-the-job as caregiver to her husband.
Robyn and Alan’s Story
Robyn met Alan Stoller on a retreat in 1994. Two years later they married. Four years later, in March of 2000, Alan had his kidney removed for renal cell carcinoma. Given a clean bill of health, they started to raise a family. 
A 15 Year Old Lump
“He had a lump on his arm for as long as I’d known him.” Robyn says. Over the course of the 15 years that the lump was there, Alan asked physicians about it and had been told it was a lipoma, a non-cancerous fatty lump. “’Just leave it,’” they said.”
Yet during the summer of 2009, Alan decided to get the lump removed. “Nothing was as it appeared,” Robyn remembers. What was supposed to be the easy removal of a non-cancerous lump became the removal of a rare and aggressive form of cancer. “We started with something treatable and curable to being told Alan had stage 4 pleomorphic rhabdomysarcoma.”
Whipped from one crisis to the next, the family remained hopeful. When Alan’s first chemotherapy failed, and their first oncologist gave up completely, they fired him. “…He likened chemotherapy to baking a cake—you follow the recipe and, most of the time, the cake comes out just right. I mean, REALLY?!” Robyn wrote in a post she called “Who is Dr. Schmuck?”
Through perseverance, they found Dr. David Sidransky of Johns Hopkins Medical Center and his new company, Champions Oncology. In a recent article in Science magazine, Robyn shares their experience with this innovative personalized approach to cancer treatment. Mice without an immune system are sickened with cancer cells harvested from the patient and then treated with a variety of cancer drugs. The idea is to find the best treatment for the specific cancer that the patient has: personalization. “I LOVE them!” Robyn writes. “They helped add six to seven quality months to Alan’s life.”
Despite these efforts, Alan passed away in July 2010.
Sharing Hard Won Knowledge
“Knowledge is power,” Robyn believes. “Alan passed away and I had all this knowledge to share so I started blogging. “ For example, after Alan had brain surgery at MD Anderson in Texas, she needed to get Alan home to Maryland. She learned that there is an organization called Corporate Angels that provides free travel for anyone who needs to fly because of cancer. “Who knows about them? I didn’t.” But she had the ability to find out.
Born of Sorrow
Her website is named CancerHawk because a hawk’s keen eyes can see what others miss. Likewise, Robyn uses her skills to hunt down resources. “My mission is to connect cancer patients and caregivers to groups and resources they never knew existed or even thought to seek out.” Robyn knows that finding information improves the lives of caregivers and patients as they navigate the healthcare system with cancer. She understands that doing everything you can for your loved one brings peace of mind: “It would really frustrate me as a patient advocate if there was a technology that might help and yet was inaccessible,” she says. “No matter what it costs—let me get my hands on it.”
Her website is a fount of information. “There’s groups that provide people affected by breast cancer with free weddings, there’s financial resources, groups that will clean your house, help your kids go to college….I could go on and on.”
Not only does she communicate about resources, but she also provides advice borne from their hard experience like: “only work with an Oncologist who has either seen 
miracles happen (even just one is fine) or at least believes in miracles. Miracles happen all the time. And although our story did not end the way I intended it to, I still believe many miracles happened along the way… after all, lots of beautiful memories were made in the extra 6-7 months that we had with Alan. And I am very grateful for that!”
CancerHawk doesn’t make money. “I see myself as a matchmaker, bringing people and resources together,” she relates. CancerHawk is all about education because as Robyn knows firsthand, “Knowledge is hope. Hope gave us the strength to get out of bed each day and enjoy whatever time our family had left together….Hope is everything.”
Based on personal interview conducted October 16, 2014.
