Jesse Plascak’s career as a cancer researcher is inspired and shaped by his family.
Jesse Plascak was born and raised in NE Ohio and currently resides in Central Ohio with two teenage kids and wife. He is new to the storytelling scene, but thinks it could be powerful tool for exchange and change. Scientifically, he is a trained cancer epidemiologist trying to reduce the cancer burden by generating and assessing evidence of life circumstances in impacting cancer.
Story Transcript
I come from a close-knit working class family who really prioritize practicality over creature comforts. Now, this was mostly a pretty good thing because my sisters and I were taught resourcefulness. But then on the flip side, sometimes I felt like I didn't have quite the right tools for the job.
This was fully on display during freshman move‑in day to Ohio State University in 2002. When I walked into my dorm room, I found my roommates unpacking, setting up new computers, putting them on their desk, and I proceeded to place my boom box that I brought on my desk to where a computer should have been. But through visits to the computer labs and through the generosity of my roommates who lent their computers to me, I managed to graduate from OSU four years later.
In and around those years, though, a lot was really going on with my family's health. In 2002, an aunt had died of cancer. In 2005, another aunt was diagnosed with cancer. And just two years after that, in 2007, an uncle died of cancer. All of that prompted me to want to pursue a PhD in cancer research because it seemed like so many family members were at risk of this disease. As a first-gen college student, I felt this kind of dual sense of responsibility to figure out what was going on with my family and also, honestly, a sense of anxiety for who in my family might be diagnosed with cancer next.
So it's years later. I'm in my first faculty position at Rutgers University as a cancer researcher. Several cancer epidemiologists, including myself, had observed that the length of time that people live following a cancer diagnosis is heavily dependent on their life circumstances, also called the cancer disparity. Studies consistently showed that living in zip codes with high poverty was associated with shorter cancer survival.
But reducing poverty to improve cancer survival is a really hard sell. A lot of people think it's impractical. Studies showing that more modifiable life circumstances, things that were more changeable, things like infrastructure investment that could improve healthy living, reduce stress, and improve cancer survival, that evidence really didn't exist.
I knew that such evidence could only come from large studies, and those studies would require funding from places like the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. But NIH funding is hard to get in general, and it's even harder when studying life circumstances because so little funding is devoted to that topic.
So it's the end of a long work day. I'm exhausted, having taught and graded epidemiology assignments all day. I'm at home, and my kids, Jake, who was 10 at the time, and Leah, who was eight, were in bed. So it was a great time to log back on and do some low mental effort tasks like scrolling.
So I'm like half awake, scrolling NIH's website, looking for funding opportunities, when I run across one titled, “Leveraging Population‑Based Cancer Registries to Study Cancer Disparities.” My eyes locked on. There was this infusion of energy from the adrenaline and I immediately perked up. After reading the description, I realized this would be my best shot for studying how modifiable life circumstances impact cancer survival.
So I quickly rip off a couple emails to potential collaborators, ask if they want to form a team for a grant submission to NIH, to which they thankfully agree. As it turns out, though, finding a funding opportunity and a willing team was the easy part. The harder part was writing this thing.
And it's not that these things are long. In fact, they're capped at 13 pages. But the few thousand words on those pages have to be carefully sculpted in order to convince an independent panel of other researchers that the project is scientifically rigorous and impactful. And like other cancer researchers, I had a day job and a proverbial side hustle. So my nine‑to‑five consisted of teaching, grading, advising current students, reviewing applications of prospective students, leading other studies, contributing to studies led by other researchers, and reviewing other researcher studies.
So with these and other tasks built in the day, grant writing became like a weekend and evening side hustle. My kids would go to bed, and I go to my computer and write.
This was coming along decently well, the writing, when one day I was talking to my dad on the phone. It was our weekly phone conversation. And he tells me he's got this weird feeling like something's caught in his throat.
I say, “Dad, what do you think that is?” And he goes, “Ahh, I don't know.” He goes, “It's probably like an allergy, allergic reaction. Yeah, it's probably nothing big.”
So three things you have to know about my dad at this point. He's got like a 30‑year history of allergic reactions to things, mainly really bad rashes he would get from the chemicals and dust that he was exposed to in his work as a construction worker.
Number two is that he was a no‑frills type. In fact, one of his favorite phrases was “shit and git”. So if it wasn't work, If work or family was not on the list, then it was number 10 on his list.
And three is that he had the physique, a little bit of the looks, and, unfortunately, a little bit of the self‑care of Patrick Swayze's character in Road House, in that he really didn't take the best care.
So after about one or two months, though, these symptoms progressed with difficulty swallowing, with additional symptoms of fatigue, nausea, and he lost about 20 pounds. That physique was mainly gone.
So we scheduled an appointment with his primary care doc, which led to referral to a specialist, more appointments, scans, and eventually biopsies, consultations, and one more scan that led to the final diagnosis in mid-February 2020. He had terminal stomach cancer.
That hit me like a ton of bricks. It was completely disorienting. It made me think back to my aunt and uncle who died of their cancer, and then ahead, what the future might look like. I question myself. I mean, I call myself a cancer researcher. Couldn't prevent the worst within a loved one.
So as a coping strategy, I threw myself deeper into research and grant writing. The team managed to submit our NIH application that summer 2020, expecting results out later that fall.
November comes around. It's a COVID normal workday. I'm at home when I receive an email from NIH with subject line: “Review results available”. I knew that I needed a score that was good enough to get me within the 14th percentile, with the first percentile being the best. That's what you can do. Because NIH let everyone know that the 14th percentile was their funding cutoff line.
So I eagerly navigate to NIH's website, find the results, and score 37, impact percentile 28. Not good enough. It felt like dozens of nights and weekends just kind of down the tubes.
But then I realized, you get two shots with these because teams are allowed to make changes and then resubmit for one last review. So with the helpful comments we got from reviewers, we overhauled the project and we resubmitted summer of 2021.
So now it's evening, October 29, 2021. My family and I just finished dinner. We're still sitting around the table when that email hits from NIH, “Review results available”. My stomach knots up. This is it. I know this is my last shot.
With all the nights and weekends away from my family and into the resubmission, I thought it would be fun to start a new tradition where one of my kids would read my grant review results to me. I thought, “Sounds like a great idea, right?” I thought it would be a fun way to include them on any work successes.
So I asked Jake and Leah. I say, “Who wants to report the grant review results to me?” And Jake being the adventurous one, he volunteers.
So I pop my laptop open and go to the webpage and give Jake instructions on how to find these things. As he's doing this, kind of parsing all the extraneous information, because it's, you know, government. There's not just one big number, right? So I take a step back and I'm nervously pacing.
After what felt like this elongated silence, Jake shouts out, “23.” My heart sinks. I needed 14. But after thinking for a minute, it didn't really make sense. Because we've been so responsive to reviewers' comments on the first submission, and 23 was nearly identical to the percentile of the first submission.
So I asked Jake, “Wait, is 23 the score or the percentile?”
He looks back. “The score.”
I say, “What's the percentile?”
And he goes, “11.” And the most immediate and strongest feeling of relief came over me. I mean, it was like a load had been lifted from my shoulders. So many stressors that I had began to dissipate, and clarity filled the spaces that those stressors occupied. It meant a lot as a first-gen college grad. And, scientifically, this project could inform how modifiable life circumstances may be related to cancer survival.
But more importantly, I was able to share the good news with my parents, and especially my father, whose health is declining at this point. See, people with terminal cancer may still be eligible for treatment, including systemic chemotherapy. But chemo is oftentimes a nonspecific treatment that wreaks havoc across the body. For some people, this can impact their ability to walk and even think.
These symptoms were going on with my dad, and they were getting worse about the time when I found out about that grant’s fundability. But I was able to share the news with him and my mom during a visit soon after.
About a month after that, my father died from his cancer. Knowing he had terminal cancer gave my family time to prepare, but it didn't take away the pain or the sadness. His death was also clarifying, not for the stressors that it took away, but for the affirmation that it left in its wake. In making sense of it all, I finally realized that my life circumstances provided me with the tools that I needed for the job all along.
Thank you.