Kites for a Cure Offers Hope for Survival

On an overcast Saturday afternoon, a light wind scattered the clouds across Cooper’s Beach in Southampton at the Eighth Annual “Kites for a Cure Benefit” against lung cancer organized by Uniting Against Lung Cancer.

More than 200 friends and families had gathered to make kites in memory of those who had succumbed to lung cancer and to raise money and hope for those who still suffer from the disease, which kills more people each year in the US than colon, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancers combined. Still, it receives less federal research funding per death than any of the other major cancers.

But on a bench, surveying the crowd, and with a contented smile on her face, sat Pat Field, a five-time lung cancer survivor.

“I’ve just completed my last round of radiation,” she said. “It’s a new therapy called SBRT that’s 90 percent effective. It’s one of the newest advances in the fight against lung cancer and the acronym stands for stereotactic body radiation therapy for lung cancer—a type of radiation therapy in which a few very high doses of radiation are delivered to small, well-defined tumors. The goal is to deliver a radiation dose that is high enough to kill the cancer while minimizing exposure to surrounding healthy organs.”

She added, “I only went through three rounds of SBRT, and on Tuesday, June 3, I get my next CT scan and we expect I’ll be diagnosed as cured.”

Uniting Against Lung Cancer, the Kites for a Cure sponsoring charity, was founded in 2001 in memory of Joan Scarangello, a Southampton resident and non-smoker who lost her battle with lung cancer. The Foundation has awarded more than $11.5 million in research grants to find a cure for the disease that will claim an estimated 160,000 lives in the U.S. this year.

For Pat Field that means she’s endured a diagnosis of lung cancer five times—the first in 1998—and survived.  “I’ve been through four lung surgeries and I’ve been going to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute since the beginning,” Field said. “Lung cancer returns, but it’s always a brand new primary cell cancer not a metastasized version of my original cancer. They say if you go five years without cancer your are cured. I broke that rule twice.”

As the wind began to pick up and the homemade kites took to the air, Stacy Kaufman, a friend of Field’s and a fellow lung cancer survivor, came over to wish her friend well. Together they held up a homemade kite with RIP written across the top in memory of all those they had known who had died of the disease.