My son Marcus just turned 6. He has no idea that his mother had two brain surgeries before his first birthday or that a drug, created by research funded through federal dollars now at risk, saved my life before he took his first steps. He just knows that I’m his mom. To him, that’s the way it’s always been, but to me, it feels like a miracle.
There’s a version of this story where I’m no longer here for my kids — one where the research wasn’t there when I needed it, where the funding had been cut a decade earlier and the treatment simply didn’t exist. I think about that a lot, especially now as Congress considers cutting billions of dollars from the federal agencies that make such research possible.
I’m not a scientist or a policy expert. But I understand this: The drug that kept me alive for my children was built on a foundation of public investment.
In February 2020, I was 38 years old, 22 weeks pregnant and so sick I could barely get out of bed. Two urgent care clinics sent me home. You’re just nauseous. You’re pregnant. It’s fine. After my husband drove me to the emergency room, a scan revealed a baseball-size tumor in my brain. It was Stage 4 metastatic melanoma, with spots on my lungs, pelvis and back. Doctors never found a lesion on my skin.
I was pretty sure I was going to die. I wrote letters to each of my children — including the one I was still carrying — in case I wasn’t around to tell them the things I wanted them to know. The things a mother is supposed to say in person, over the years, that I might never get the chance to say.
What followed was a blur of decisions I barely remember. Brain surgery, a C-section at 34 weeks and two weeks recovering in the hospital while my newborn son was in the neonatal intensive care unit just down the street. We named him Marcus, after the neurosurgeon who saved my life.
Unfortunately, my tumor grew back. After my second brain surgery, my oncologist told us they had identified a marker in my cancer that made me a candidate for a combination immunotherapy regimen — two drugs, given together, every three weeks. My husband’s job between infusions was to feel the tumor on my back to see if it was changing. After my first dose, he told me he couldn’t find it anymore. We both thought he was missing it.
He wasn’t.
By October 2020, eight months after my initial diagnosis and after only four drug infusions, scans showed no evidence of disease anywhere in my body. My last infusion was in August 2020, and I’ve been in remission for more than five years.
The first time I sat in that infusion center, sobbing, I was in my 30s, surrounded by mostly elderly patients. I remember thinking: “I don’t belong here. I just had a baby. I have four kids.” What I know now is that I belong to a much larger community than I had realized: a subset of young people for whom certain cancer rates are increasing and of expecting mothers who were diagnosed while they were focused on fostering new life. Perhaps most important, I’m part of a community of people who were told their odds weren’t good and who are still here because someone, somewhere, spent years in a lab making connections that made survival possible — and had the federal government funding their tireless work.
My particular immunotherapy combination was approved by the Food and Drug Administration less than 10 years before it saved my life. It stemmed from decades of federally funded research into the immune system — the kind of painstaking, long-horizon science that doesn’t make headlines.
Now that pipeline is under threat. The Trump administration has proposed cutting $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health — the country’s medical research agency — for fiscal year 2027. This is the second year in a row that the administration has put NIH funding on the chopping block. Although Congress rejected some cuts last year, the odds of winning a cancer research grant have already shifted from roughly 1 in 10 to 1 in 25. Already, NIH spending on new medical research has slowed significantly.
Nongovernmental and philanthropic organizations are helping. For example, the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute — for which I am a volunteer patient advocate — has funded immunotherapy research since its founding more than 70 years ago. Its work includes research that established the critical immune checkpoint targeted by my drug, and it has committed emergency reserve funding to keep research going. But private giving cannot replicate the scale of what federal investment makes possible.
Already, NIH spending on new medical research has slowed significantly.
I’m a pediatric occupational therapist. I manage a household with four kids, ages 6 to 14. I sing in my church choir. I’m not a scientist or a policy expert. But I understand this: The drug that kept me alive for my children was built on a foundation of public investment. Taxpayers funded the research and the clinical trials. This country made a long bet on science, and I’m alive because it paid off.
Marcus doesn’t know any of this yet. He’s 6. He just knows that I’m his mom and that I show up. Someday I’ll explain what it took to make that possible — the surgeries, the science, the researchers who worked for years hoping for one breakthrough.
What I hope I never have to tell him is that our country decided to stop funding miracles like mine.
Jenney Bitner is a pediatric occupational therapist and cancer survivor living in Washington state.