Irene: A Birthday Wish

In the dim light of Irene Price's dining room, a small Mickey Mouse cake bears two candles casting a warm glow onto the surrounding faces. As the birthday boy claps along from his high-chair while his family sings "Happy Birthday," a grin of pure joy breaks across his great-grandmother's face. For this cancer survivor, sharing precious moments with family makes beating back the disease so much sweeter.

"You see time through the eyes of your children and grandchildren," said Price, the subject of Episode 3 of the Inside Medicine online video series. "And fortunately, I've been a very lucky lady."

Price is no stranger to cancer. Her son Gary struggled with aplastic anemia as a teenager and she lost her husband Gene to gastric esophageal cancer in 1991. Then, in 2009, Price was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

For five years, Price tried the standard treatments — chemotherapy and a bladder-cancer-specific immunotherapy — both of which she said had shown promise. But then her cancer started to metastasize; she was running out of options — and time.

"I found out my cancer had penetrated the wall of my bladder, so it had to be removed," Price said. "That's when they asked me to take part in precision medicine. I said yes — it's a win-win situation.”

Learn how precision medicine led Price and her physicians to an unexpected treatment that has shown promising results.