This is personal for me, and what you will read inside this 50th anniversary issue of Promise & Progress truly is from the heart. 

I started my career at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in 1986 as a new college graduate and a newlywed whose husband was battling stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I was desperately searching for any bit of information about this disease everyone feared, but until that moment had never touched me personally. There was no internet, no email or social media, and the books about cancer in the library were often outdated soon after they were printed.

I yearned for information that would bring us hope and would help us understand the disease we were fighting. Words like oncology, lymphoma and metastasis were foreign to me. It was then I decided to put my journalism degree to work, with the goal of bringing hope and knowledge to others by writing about cancer in a way everyone could understand.

Those books I got from the library when my husband was diagnosed all told me that he was going to die and quickly. They were published before one of the first great success stories in the War on Cancer: a treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma that made the almost uniformly fatal cancer curable for nearly 90% of patients.

We were about to embark on an era of tremendous progress in understanding how cancer developed, and as a result, how it could be better treated. I had a front row seat, with the privilege of being able to tell these stories of promise and progress.

This has always been more of a mission than a job for me.

Dr. David Ettinger, you asked me often, “When are you going to write the history of this cancer center?” I hope what you read in this issue fulfills that request. I hope it honors the journeys of our patients and families, celebrates the amazing work of the many incredible people of a Cancer Center that is second to none, acknowledges the many donors who made the work possible, and brings some comfort and hope to those who are waging their own battles.

With gratitude,

Valerie Matthews Mehl

Editor and Sr. Writer

The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center Office of Public Affairs