“Knowing that his disease had a high cure rate, Ben Dacus felt a sense of security at a time of great uncertainty. In 1988 he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

Strangely enough, Ben’s reaction to his diagnosis was one of relief. ‘I was relieved to know my illness had a name, and because of the high cure rate, I never really feared that I was going to die. Hodgkin’s had a long history of research, and doctors had been treating it succesfully for many year.’

When radiation treatments didn’t work, Ben was devastated. But to his relief chemotherapy afforded him a rapid recovery.

Looking back on his illness, Ben says he is thankful for medical research. ‘It didn’t occur to me at the time I was going through treatment to consider how medical research had brought treatment methods to the point it had. But I was thankful to live in a day and age when cancer is treatable. If it had been the 1950s, I would have died four years later.”