LESLIE LACHANCE: Be sure to arrive 15 minutes early for your appointment. Days fill in like a still pond, muck and duckweed. My name is Leslie LaChance, and I am a writer, a poet, and an educator. I have been living for the past three years with non-small-cell lung cancer. I was a nonsmoker. I lived a healthy lifestyle, and so the diagnosis was devastating.

So I decided that I was going to google my way to a cure. Cure for stage IV lung cancer. And, of course, you keep coming up empty. Thankfully through searching online, I have joined several support groups with people who have really good information. It's been so helpful for me. And I found the Go To Foundation early in my treatment, and the Go To Foundation provided me with information about clinical trials, about new drugs, about research. So it's been invaluable.

The oncologist recommended that my tumor tissue be sent for biomarker testing, and that was to find out if I might be a good match for a targeted therapy or if immunotherapy would be a good approach. We learned that I was positive for a genetic rearrangement. There was treatment available in the form of a targeted therapy.

I actually started feeling a lot better almost right away. Then the cancer began to become resistant. This is very common. We were waiting for it. I decided to enter a clinical trial for a new targeted therapy. I had very good results with that. I did have some disease progression several times. We treated it with radiation and with standard-of-care infusion chemo, and then I went back on the targeted therapy and have had stable disease and no evidence of it.

For patients, it's so important to reach out and find support groups. Sometimes you just need to talk to someone else who has lung cancer. Don't give up hope. When you visit your oncologist, ask a lot of questions. There are no dumb questions. There is treatment. Biomarker testing is an important part of the treatment, especially in late-stage lung cancer, to see if you might have a targetable genetic mutation.

These are butterfly. I put my hope in science. What researchers are really studying now, why does our cancer become resistant to treatment? We need funding for research. Lung cancer is one of the least funded. But of all the cancers, lung cancer kills the most people. So I put my hope in more research. "We drag our fixed selves to basement suites for radiation treatment, number four of five. On the ceiling above the CyberKnife, that picture of a butterfly perched on a bloom."