From the President’s Desk

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Making a difference

Emily E. Volk, MD

May 2023—The spring of 2003 was not an easy time for me. I was taking care of my kids, a four-year-old and an infant, while going through a divorce. I had just started a new job and felt all the stress associated with that. The upheaval in my life sometimes felt overwhelming.

And that’s when Gene Herbek, MD, called. This was long before his term as president of the CAP, but I knew him from our joint work in membership at the CAP. He asked if I would participate in one of the early See, Test & Treat events—a program he had founded in 2001 to bring quality cancer screening to underserved communities at no cost.

Not long after, I found myself clinging for dear life to the armrest of a little puddle jumper carrying me and my friend Jeanne Jax, who was then the chief cytotechnologist at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., to Pierre, SD. We met up with other CAP members and staff and drove to the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where we spent the next several days providing screenings for cervical cancer and breast cancer with same-day results. It was impossible not to notice the lack of resources in this community. But our ability to help was just as clear: We identified a few patients who would likely have progressed to untreatable cancer if they had not been diagnosed and gotten immediate intervention. I remember one patient diagnosed with squamous carcinoma in situ of the uterine cervix, and another patient diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer via fine needle aspiration biopsy. If we hadn’t been there, those women may not have had the chance for life-saving medical intervention.

As you can imagine, taking several days away for this trip was not an easy choice to make with everything else going on in my life. I wasn’t alone: It turned out that almost everybody on our small CAP team was experiencing some kind of turmoil. In addition to the personal fulfillment of being able to do good for this Native American community, we wound up appreciating the personal relief of getting away from our own troubles and seeing our own challenges through a different lens.

Dr. Volk

After I went home, that altered perspective stayed with me. My personal chaos, which had seemed enormous when I left, came into the appropriate context. I felt gratitude for the resources I had and found myself managing through my challenges with a bit more grace.

That was my first experience with the See, Test & Treat program, but certainly not my last. Today I am a dedicated supporter of the CAP Foundation, which has taken See, Test & Treat and grown it into a national program. The foundation aims to improve health by developing future pathology leaders and by mobilizing pathologists to improve health equity in medically underserved communities.

To date, there have been more than 100 See, Test & Treat events around the U.S., serving more than 7,500 women. That number of people touched by the program is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that one woman’s life saved immediately affects 10 to 20 other lives. And in many communities, women are often the primary breadwinners and caregivers of their families. These programs are keeping mothers healthy and at home so they can care for their children and continue working. The reach of the program is long. The impact is huge.

Every year, the CAP Foundation partners with more than a dozen health care institutions and clinics, giving out more than $150,000 in grants to pathologists to host these events. People who are diagnosed through these screenings also receive a treatment plan to help them through the first steps in addressing their cancer.