Eliza Stokes Adams 1960–2017

A note from her family:

Our brilliant, beautiful, and brave Eliza Stokes Adams pedaled from this world on April 24, 2017. She was 56. Lover of adventure, travel, games, long-distance cycling, singing, every excuse for a celebration, and, most emphatically, her family and friends (a distinction that often seemed blurred), she leaves with us her extraordinary gifts of grace, love, joy, and her competitive sense of fun. We miss her every minute of every day.

August 2017 would have been Eliza’s fifth year riding the Pan Mass Challenge. She rode with joy and determination, carried by the music that often wafted from her bike. Eliza loved everything about the PMC —the training, the ride itself, the community, the personal competition to be better every year, and the money she raised; and she believed passionately in the power of research to improve treatments for, and ultimately to cure, cancer. She volunteered for two years at the Barnstable water stop, and then began riding on the Rialto-Trade, now Porto-Trade team. She was a heavy hitter and raised $47,861 over four years for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

After an initial breast cancer diagnosis in 2005 and what appeared to be successful treatment, Eliza discovered in May 2013 that the breast cancer had metastasized. She rode in the PMC for the first time that year. When it progressed to my liver in early 2014, I thought I ought to figure out a better way to live, focused on curing cancer - my own and everyone else's, she said in an interview.

She served as an independent patient and research advocate. At Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, she worked with the Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium, acting as the lead advocate on the Triple Negative Working Group; participated in the Patient Advocate and Hormone Resistant working group; and served on Sloan's Institutional Review Board for drug trials. She also was an active volunteer at SHARE, the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network, and the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance, and was certified multiple times by the National Board for Certified Counselors. In 2015, Eliza received the inaugural Susan G. Komen NYC Thriver Award. Along with her work, she found a transcendent joy in related activities. This was particularly evident in her role as a fierce member of the Empire Dragon Boat Team NYC and her years as a rider and volunteer for the Pan Mass Challenge.

Eliza's letter 2016

When I started training for my first PMC ride in March 2013, my motivation was for a sort of theoretical concept of cancer. I was 8 years out from my own early stage breast cancer diagnosis and I was dedicating my ride to all the breast cancer warriors who had come before me who had helped pave the way for better treatments and better outcomes. I was riding with the belief that my own breast cancer, as I understood it, was cured, and I was riding to develop a cure for all cancers.

But, of course, my breast cancer had merely been slumbering for 8 years and, just two months later, in May, I learned that the cancer had metastasized to my bones. Although my motivation for that ride really didn’t change much, the new diagnosis did set me on a path to dig deeper into the world of cancer research – to understand better what I was raising money for and how that related to me.

Two things to know about metastatic breast cancer: the patient is never “done” with treatment (when one stops working, you move onto the next) and a principal aim is to enable the patient to maintain as high a quality of life as possible. And indeed, if that is the goal, then I have been able to achieve the gold star standard of high quality living these past three years. Because there are various treatment options with relatively minimal side effects for women whose cancer is driven by estrogen (as mine is), the first efforts are always to try a number of these drugs. So, for the first year or so those were the drugs I was given, but eventually, my cancer proved to be hormone resistant.

Each time that a drug stopped working, I have moved onto another and am now on my seventh treatment regime and my fourth clinical trial since the metastatic diagnosis. As I started to chronicle the hows and whens and whys of where I am today, I found that the document got way too long (and probably tedious to read). But I do feel that to truly understand my motivation to raise money for cancer research, it helps too see how the sausage is made and what it means for those of us living with metastatic cancer. The four investigational drugs I have been on so far have targeted four differerent genetic mutations that show up in my cancer and and are the direct outgrowth of today's research.

The latest investigational drug that I am on is an oral medication that targets the PTEN mutation. I have been on this drug for just about 3 months and there have been minimal side effects. The scan and cancer marker results have been somewhat inconsistent, but overall, the cancer appears to be stable – for today. My next scan will be sometime in August after the PMC and we will assess then. But, whatever the outcome, I am comforted by the knowledge that there are still additional treatments out there that will be available to me if my cancer progresses on this drug or the next.

Each drug I have been on - whether approved or investigational – is the result of research dollars raised through events like the PMC. These low impact targeted agents are the direct result of some of the amazing biomedical developments of the past couple of decades. It does feel like we are on the verge of something great in the world of cancer. And, I think we are. But we still have a way to go, and research organizations like Dana Farber and Memorial Sloan Kettering are at the forefront of these efforts, which is why I keep riding in the PMC.