By Dwight Adams

Life Behind the Lens

Two generations of cancer pull a filmmaker’s family together

By Dwight Adams

Reichert and her daughter faced different diseases and different treatments. For her Hodgkin lymphoma, Reichert-Klein underwent a nine-month course of chemotherapy and radiation treatment at the Dayton Oncology Group during her senior year of high school. Because Reichert had a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sometimes called gray-zone lymphoma because it has characteristics of both Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphomas, she faced a more toxic therapy regimen that lasted about five months. Radiation and six stints of increasing dosages of chemo succeeded in shrinking the large tumor in her chest.

“She definitely had an aggressive type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” Porcu says of Reichert. “Her treatment went very well. She’s in complete remission.”

Today, Reichert still makes documentaries and continues in her role of teaching film at Wright State University in Dayton, while her daughter is now in her third year at Harvard Law School. Although both women have recovered from their cancers, they faced bouts of mental and physical fatigue afterward, and in Reichert’s case, concerns about possible cognitive impairment, or “chemobrain,” resulting from her treatment. And Reichert-Klein, who made the decision to quit smoking a year ago and visits the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University in Chicago every year for a comprehensive health examination, admits that she has had concerns about developing breast cancer, which is more common among childhood cancer survivors.

In fact, as the number of cancer survivors has grown—to nearly 12 million today—so have the needs of survivors for follow-up medical care to address the risks of long-term damage to the brain, heart, reproductive system and other organs from the effects of radiation and chemotherapy.

Since their successful recoveries from cancer, Reichert and her daughter have both been active in survivorship issues, including founding in 2005 the website Survivor Alert, which encourages young adult survivors of cancer to learn about their health risks and seek follow-up care.

“We really try to use our own experiences and share them with other people,” Reichert-Klein says of her and her mother’s commitment to supporting cancer survivors like themselves. “We’re in a unique position. We know more about this than most people.”

Laura Zauderer, a public health adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has worked closely with Reichert and her daughter on survivorship issues, providing guidance and monitoring CDC funding of Survivor Alert. Zauderer says the pair’s unique experiences with cancer have helped make them effective speakers at outreach events, such as the Cure Childhood Cancer conference in Atlanta last fall.

“They both speak from different roles in the cancer spectrum,” she says. “They have both been patients, they have both been caregivers, and now they’re both educators and advocates.”