Running for her - and for thousands
In the summer of 2000, Kelli Sargent was headed to London for an internship, but she almost didn’t get on the plane. Her mother, Nancy, hadn’t been feeling well for a few months, and Kelli was worried.
Then again, her mother had beaten a grim prognosis years earlier with Hodgkin’s disease. Kelli’s parents convinced her everything would be fine, so off she went to London.
A few weeks later, she got a call from home.
“My parents told me it was ovarian cancer and I burst into tears.”
Kelli returned to Los Angeles, where her mother’s cancer was diagnosed at 3C, an advanced stage. When caught early, ovarian cancer is highly treatable, but late diagnosis is very common — and often deadly. That’s because the symptoms are often vague, not the sort of thing that send a person to rushing to the doctor. Even when a woman does go in early, doctors often don’t suspect cancer immediately, as happened in Nancy Sargent’s case.
Once the correct diagnosis was finally made, Nancy Sargent did have one advantage. She was referred to Dr. Beth Karlan, one of the world’s leading specialists, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Karlan, who runs the Women’s Cancer Research Institute, operated on Sargent and started chemo, to which she responded remarkably well.
Not only did she thrive for years after her diagnosis, significantly exceeding the average life expectancy for such an advanced stage, but her spirit became a source of inspiration to staff and patients. Sargent was determined to raise awareness about ovarian cancer, and one of the women she inspired was her daughter.
For her master’s thesis at the University of San Francisco, where she was studying sports management, Kelli Sargent designed a marketing plan for a 5k run and walk. It would become known as Run for Her.
Since the first Run for Her five years ago, 13,000 participants have raised $3 million. Sunday, , 5,000 runners and walkers are expected to gather at Pan Pacific Park in L.A.’s Fairfax district for the sixth running of the annual event. It all begins at 9, with a festival to follow until noon, with food, music and information booths (for more information or sponsorship details go to https://www.runforher.com).
“Never in a million years would I ever have imagined this,” said Kelli Sargent, who has since gone to work in community relations at Cedars-Sinai, which sponsors the event.
The Run for Her has spread to several other U.S. cities and five other countries, and Sargent’s goal this year was to register runners, walkers or donors in all 50 states. Kelli’s brother Scott, sister Nicole and father, Mike, have all pitched in to make Run for Her a raging success.
I might not have known about any of this if not for the fact that my sister, Debbie, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer almost five years ago. When the cancer metastasized to her brain, Dr. Karlan offered some invaluable medical advice, and Debbie is doing well today, having just flown down from the Bay Area to celebrate Halloween with my daughter.
It was Paula Anastasia, a clinical nurse specialist on Karlan’s staff, who told me about Nancy and Kelli Sargent, and last week I toured the Women’s Cancer Research Institute with Kelli. The lab staff has doubled to about 40 in recent years, in part because of the money raised by Run for Her.
Xiao Yang, a lab assistant, showed me a speck of DNA she had isolated from a blood sample. Hang Tran, a research associate, let me peer through a microscope at cancer cells from the abdominal fluid of cancer patients.
Their research is aimed at finding better ways to screen for ovarian cancer, as well as to study genetic and environmental factors and to develop more effective treatment. Karlan has collected more than 100,000 tissue samples from her patients since the early 1990s to aid in these efforts.
The doctor told me she is kept awake at night trying to understand why she can operate on two ovarian cancer patients the same day, with nearly identical cell structures and conditions, only to have one live many more years than the other.
Such mysteries may take years to solve, but Karlan said the plain fact is that early detection can save thousands of lives. In just the last year, there were an estimated 13,850 deaths from ovarian cancer in the United States. Too often, Karlan said, women are too tough for their own good. They’ve experienced childbirth and periods, and they’re not inclined to be alarmed by minor aches and pains.
But she urged women to see a doctor if any of the following symptoms last longer than two or three weeks: bloating, nausea, indigestion, abdominal pain, change in bowel habits, increased frequency of urination, abnormal vaginal bleeding and unexplained weight loss or gain.
Kelli says her mother took on cancer like “a true warrior,” traveling and enjoying life, never complaining and feeling grateful the disease hadn’t ravaged her more quickly. She participated in the first three Run for Her events, but the cancer eventually spread to her brain and she died in 2008, roughly nine years after being diagnosed. She was 62.
As we toured the research lab, I asked Kelli what her mother had done for a living, and she said Nancy Sargent left a career in advertising to raise a family.
“She was a mother,” she said, “and a friend.”
