A SURVIVOR’S STORY: Lauren Bendesky credits persistent positivity with helping her to defeat neuroblastoma while excelling in school and striving to reach her career goals. COURTESY OF LAUREN BENDESKY
A cancer diagnosis often claims more than a pound of flesh, damaging many patients’ energy, motivation, and sense of hope along with their bodies. But not if that patient is Lauren Bendesky. In May 2012, when she was 14 years old, doctors in Bendesky’s home state of Florida removed a fifteen-and-a-half-pound tumor from her abdomen. Their diagnosis: Stage 4 neuroblastoma, a cancer that usually attacks infants or toddlers and can vary from a death sentence to a disease treatable with several modern therapies.
“There was a week or so—not that I was really depressed or not OK with what was going on—that I kind of questioned why I had to go through this,” Bendesky, now 18 years old, told The Scientist. But that brief moment ...
