Tiffany O’Keefe will tell you that her life is pretty normal — at least as normal as it can be with three teenagers at home. For this Washington elementary-school teacher, normalcy is a huge accomplishment.

In 2004, O’Keefe, then 32, was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her lung after she showed up at the ER with shortness of breath. In the course of the next decade, she lost that lung, endured miserable side effects from chemotherapy, and ran through treatment after treatment as her cancer recurred four times.

More than three years ago, O’Keefe enrolled on a clinical trial and became the first person ever to receive a new type of experimental cancer vaccine, which uses a modified virus to teach patients’ immune systems to kill their tumors. Her cancer shrunk to a fraction of its former size and, though it’s still present, has stayed quiet since then, allowing that precious normalcy to return.

After three sets of vaccine injections over six weeks during the summer of 2014, a scan showed that O’Keefe’s cancer had stopped growing. At her next scan, two months later, her cancer had shrunk a bit. A couple months later, her cancer was only three-quarters its original size. By 2016, two years after her first injection, only 15 percent of her original tumor mass remained. It has stayed there ever since, without additional treatment.

O’Keefe knows she has had one of the best responses to the vaccine of any of the patients on the trial and feels “very fortunate,” she said. For now, she prefers her doctors not to tell her where her remaining cancer is at her checkups. She knows herself well enough: Every little ache or pain near the tumor site, wherever it is, would plunge her into a morass of anxiety about whether her cancer was growing again. And, for now, she knows there’s nothing more she could do to keep it from coming back if it wanted to.

Read the source article at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center