By Dwight Adams

Life Behind the Lens

Two generations of cancer pull a filmmaker’s family together

By Dwight Adams

“In this case, [there are] two generations with almost the same type of lymphoma,” Porcu says of Reichert and her daughter. “It is rare, but we do see it. For Hodgkin lymphoma, it is well-known that there is sometimes a familial connection. It is probable that they share something that leads to lymphoma.”

The wholly individual battle with cancer, particularly pediatric cancer, can have very different impacts on the lives of survivors’ families. Reichert-Klein’s cancer journey brought her natural parents, who were amid a bitter breakup at the time, closer together in the mutual fight against a disease that was threatening their daughter. But in the course of the four-hour film, several other families appeared to suffer lasting emotional trauma from the strain, including feelings of anger, abandonment and alienation.

“We became a family again when Lela got sick,” Reichert says of the disease’s impact on her as a parent. “We realized that it was more important to support the child. Everyone became their better self.”

Robert Arceci, the former head of pediatric oncology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who recruited Reichert and Bognar to make A Lion, says it is precisely the film’s honesty in dealing with life-or-death decisions regarding children that makes it so valuable in the education of young doctors, nurses and others involved in health care. “I wanted a film that tells the story of health care that dealt with catastrophic diseases,” says Arceci, who is now at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “I wanted it to be a paradigm for issues that we deal with every day—palliative-care issues, end-of-life issues and others.”

Arceci says the film also sheds light on other important health care issues, such as the gaps in access to quality medical care, the importance of follow-up care for cancer survivors to monitor and mitigate possible side effects from earlier treatments, and the need for increased participation in clinical trials, which can lead to major medical advances. “You lose all the information and knowledge when you can’t try new things,” he says of the shortage of clinical trials, especially among adult cancer patients. “Pediatrics has, in many ways, led the way.”

The movie makes this point, too, explaining that even though the incidence of cancer among children is slowly growing, the survival rate for pediatric patients has now reached 75 percent among nations in the developed world—mostly due to clinical trial data shared among medical practitioners and care centers.

Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin are the two main types of lymphoma, a disease that targets cells of the lymphatic system, which helps fight off infections and other diseases. The lymphomas have different risk factors, with Hodgkin disease most common among teens and adults ages 15 to 35 and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or NHL, more likely to affect people older than 60.

Medical advances have improved survival rates for lymphoma, with cure rates for all patients with Hodgkin lymphoma now at about 85 percent, according to Porcu. Cure rates for non-Hodgkin lymphoma are lower, at about 50 percent, he says.