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Kathy Giusti was 37 years old when a sudden cancer diagnosis — a blood cancer called multiple myeloma — rocked her world. Giusti, a pharmaceutical sales exec and new mom, refused to accept the devastating three-year prognosis and embarked on a journey that saved her life — and along the way became a resource for others fighting their own cancer battle.
Giusti’s book, Fatal to Fearless: 12 Steps To Beating Cancer in a Broken Medical System, is culled from the 30 journals she kept during her battles with multiple myeloma and later breast cancer. It details her very personal “crash course” in fighting cancer while disrupting the medical system and co-founding the groundbreaking Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. Named one of Time magazine’s Most Influential People and Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, Giusti shares advice from top “medical insiders” and outlines the path she took from diagnosis to treatment to survivorship while providing a primer for patients and caregivers on how to ask the right questions and be their own best health advocate.
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What propelled you to write this book?
“Having been through [cancer diagnoses] in a broken system, but working my way through it, I knew what worked and I felt like I wanted to make sure I shared with everybody,” Giusti says. “Yes, you have cancer. Yes, you’re scared. I 100 percent understand your fear. But if you get the right knowledge, and if you take the right steps, you can buy yourself time, and that time, in today’s world, can potentially buy yourself a cure.”
You say our medical system is broken. Why?
“The science, especially now, is moving at breakneck speed and the system looks exactly the same,” Giusti says. She explains that the onus is on the patient to integrate the fragmented care, cobbling together a host of oncologists, specialists, physical therapists — all while getting the right diagnostic testing and keeping an eye on clinical trials. “On average, you have 16 minutes with your oncologist,” she says. “That means you’re making the decision often with your oncologist, nurse or with your caregiver and you're trying to have mutual decision-making processes.” Plus, there is the need to understand insurance coverage and associated medical costs. “So much stress on the patient and then the caregiver supporting the patient.”
And researching the diagnosis is crucial
“You need to find the credible sites. And instead of making you guess … I can tell you,” she says. “When you first start, it’s fine to go to Cancer.gov, Cancer.net or Cancer.org. Any of those three are highly reliable resources…. They’re funding all the research grants in that disease. And so, the moment we can get you to the right person and you realize they’re out there, the better off you'll be.”
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