In the Magazine

Photo courtesy of NJ DeVico and Steve Nolan

NJ Devico and Steve Nolan

Newtown, Pennsylvania
Various cancers​

Today: DeVico, left, and Nolan recently published Go Deep, a book of their paintings and poems. The fellow artists were brought together by a mutual acquaintance who mistakenly thought they had the same cancer type. In fact, Nolan was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 62 in 2014, while DeVico has had numerous cancer diagnoses beginning at age 48 in 2005 and currently has acute myeloid leukemia. Regardless, Nolan started to write poems in response to DeVico’s paintings, and DeVico started to paint in response to Nolan’s poems. The resulting book is “obviously about cancer” but also about life, death, spirituality and relationships, Nolan says. “This collaboration has been wonderful, and more important than the collaboration was the friendship that was formed out of it.”

Photo courtesy of Rosemarie Roger​​​s

Rosemarie Rogers

Richton Park, Illinois
Stage II breast cancer at age 49 in 1995

Today: Rogers, shown hiking in South Africa in October 2017, tries to visit a new country each year. She also volunteers for the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation as a grant reviewer and for the University of Illinois Cancer Center in Chicago as a member of its Patient Brigade, a group of advocates who help guide the institution’s research and community engagement efforts. Rogers says that statistics showing African-American women are more likely to die from breast cancer than white women motivate her to volunteer. She aims to encourage minority women to participate in clinical trials and to spur scientists to do research to help these patients. “I want to work with the researchers,” she says. “I don’t know if we’ll ever find a cure in my lifetime, but maybe, possibly ways to manage cancer.”​​​ ​