Confronting the Curse of Cancer by Amy Dockser Marcus, 2005 Pulitzer Prize

Newspaper - The Wall Street Journal

Confronting the Curse of Cancer by Amy Dockser Marcus, 2005 Pulitzer Prize Amy Dockser Marcus has brought a unique dimension of humanity to a forbidding and often forbidden subject — cancer. Her powerful and touching stories deal above all with how cancer patients and survivors cope with this dreaded disease. The resulting reportage is as uplifting as it is insightful.

Karen Elliott House
Publisher, The Wall Street Journal

To the Judges:

The 1.3 million Americans who will be diagnosed with cancer this year have a better chance of surviving the disease than ever before. Huge strides in detection and treatment mean that many cancers are no longer a death sentence.

In a series of powerful articles, Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Dockser Marcus showed how that success has radically transformed the nation’s long-running “war on cancer.” For decades, the battle has been about finding ways to save a person’s life. Now, it is increasingly coming to focus on how a life is lived after cancer. That is a scientific achievement to be celebrated. But it is also presenting a whole new set of challenges that doctors and patients are only beginning to confront.

It is those challenges that Ms. Dockser Marcus identified and explored throughout the year. The articles submitted here, together with at least a dozen others she wrote on the subject in 2004, helped redefine what it means to be a cancer patient and a cancer survivor. Earlier detection is putting more people in the torturous position of having to decide when cancer is the kind that can kill you and needs to be treated – and when it is too small to matter.

New “targeted” drugs are hitting the market so rapidly that some patients are trying radical means to extend their lives for even a matter of months; the no-longer-vain hope is that an effective therapy might emerge in the meantime. And patients who survive must learn to live with a disease that often never really goes away.

Ms. Dockser Marcus’s stories put these issues on the map. For the paper’s front page, she wrote six detailed, wrenching stories about the costs and consequences of beating cancer. These accounts, which showcase the depth of Ms. Dockser Marcus’s reporting and her narrative power, bring to life the dilemmas facing individual patients and their families. Each required an extraordinary bond of trust between Ms. Dockser Marcus and her subjects.

Elsewhere in the paper, she repeatedly broke news on cancer technology and survivorship, documenting cancer’s transformation from killer disease to what for many people has become more like a chronic health condition.

The article “Sickness and Health: A Wife’s Struggle with Cancer Takes an Unexpected Toll” chronicled the corrosive impact of the disease – including a mastectomy, chemotherapy and a heart transplant – on a 33-year marriage. The couple entrusted Ms. Dockser Marcus with private diaries, conversations, feelings, even the content of therapy sessions. The result was a story that brought readers deeply into the couple’s relationship, showing cancer’s impact on everything from retirement plans to the decision on whether to sleep in the same room.

Paul E. Steiger
Managing Editor
January 28, 2005

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Confronting the Curse of Cancer: An Intimate Focus on Emerging Survival Strategies
A collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles

by Amy Dockser Marcus. THEWALL STREET JOURNAL.
in the category of Beat Reporting

Sickness and Health: A Wife’s Struggle with Cancer Takes an Unexpected Toll
September 8, 2004 .......................................................... 6
Survival Strategy: New Approaches to Lung Cancer: Being Aggressive
June 29, 2004 ............................................................... 9
Next Chapter: After Leukemia, Family Struggles to Define ‘Normal’
June 9, 2004 .......................................................... 12
Independent Study: A Medical Student Takes On Rare Case – His Own Disease
April 1, 2004 .............................................. 15
Outside Shot: A Patient’s Quest to Save New Drug Hits Market Reality
November 16, 2004 .............................................. 17
Burden of Proof: At 32, a Decision: Is Cancer Small Enough to Ignore?
December 20, 2004 .............................................. 20
Cancer Fight Shifts to Survivors: As More Patients Outlast Disease, CDC and Hospitals Alter Treatment Strategies; Debate Heats Up on Defining a Cancer Survivor
March 24, 2004 .................................................. 23
Fighting Cancer with a Frown: Research Questions Role of Optimism in Beating the Disease
April 6, 2004 .................................................................. 25
Early Warning: A New Way to Find Cancer
December 7, 2004 ...................................................... 27

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