Beyond Cancer

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Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. Jane Pauley is off today. I'm Dr. John Lapook, and this is a special edition of Sunday Morning.

Special and unusual as well. That's because I'm here in my role as a doctor as well as a broadcast journalist. Together this morning, we'll be looking at cancer, at its impact on patients and families, and most importantly at research that offers hope of someday reaching a world beyond cancer. I'll be reporting on advances in immunotherapy, teaching the body to fight off cancer more effectively. And among the other issues we'll be exploring, the dramatic steps some women are taking after breast cancer surgery. As Erin Moriarty will be telling us, it's a matter of choice. I didn't choose to go flat.

It chose me. Meet women who are breaking the silence and the rules when it comes to dealing with breast cancer. Instead of reconstructive surgery, they are embracing their scars. I love my body more than I ever have before.

My body is good enough. Ahead on Sunday morning, what it means to go flat. A string of cancer cases near a polluted area. Is that cause and effect or just a random occurrence? Turns out cancer clusters are hard to prove, as Anna Werner discovered. Is there something in the water in one New Hampshire community? Would you even walk in that stream right now knowing what you know?

With my boots on. Searching for the cause of a cancer cluster and separating the facts from the fear. Ahead on Sunday morning. Cheryl Crow is a singer with a cancer message informed by personal experience. This morning she shares it with Rita Braver. Today Cheryl Crow is happily making music and delighting in her role as a mom within 2006. You're young and suddenly they're telling you you've got breast cancer.

It's like one of those scenes in a movie where all of a sudden it's like everything's swirling. I'm going to bring you into the exam room. Ahead on Sunday morning, Cheryl Crow and the value of early detection. What if anything can we do in our own day-to-day lives to possibly hold cancer at bay? Martha Teichner has some food for thought. How many times have you had cancer?

Five times. Along the way chef Eric Levine became a believer. The relationship of food to health and wellness, it's massive.

So your relationship with what you put in your grocery cart matters. Broccoli, kale, collards. From carrots to cabbage. Can you eat your way to a cancer-free life?

Later on Sunday morning. All kinds of promising cancer treatments are on the horizon. Susan Spencer will be showing us a few of them throughout the morning. What do death stalker scorpions and Great Danes have in common? They're both helping cancer doctors find new ways of treatment. I think this will potentially be the biggest improvement in cancer surgery maybe in 50 years. That's saying a lot. New cancer treatments may be just on the horizon. And this is the dog here.

This Sunday morning. It sure does. Those stories and more are just ahead.

Welcome to play it a new podcast network featuring radio and tv personalities talking business sports tech entertainment and more play it at play.it. Cancer has plagued humankind from our very beginnings. Our timeline comes from Jane Pauley. When life began, so did cancer. Prehistoric animals have cancer in humans. You can find signs of cancer in ancient specimens. Physician and scientist Siddharth Mukherjee calls cancer the emperor of all maladies in his Pulitzer prize-winning history of the disease. Around 400 BC, Hippocrates, the Greek physician known as the father of medicine, is said to have first given it a name, Karkinos. Why was it chosen? Why that word? So the word comes from crab and there was something about tumors as they sent their fingers or fingerlings into the body.

They look like the legs of a crab sort of dug underneath the sand. But the earliest reference to cancer can be found about a thousand years earlier here on this ancient Egyptian papyrus. As for treatment, it says, there is none. In fact, it's not until the arrival of anesthesia in the mid 19th century that surgery became a viable option. Who would have thought you could open up a human body, take out an ovary that may have been involved with cancer and sew that human being up again and they would come back to life. This was an amazing advancement. How many labs are there around the world doing cancer research?

Well, I would say hundreds. Mukherjee, who conducts research and treats patients at New York's Columbia University Medical Center, says by the beginning of the 20th century, X-ray technology would give rise to the very earliest form of radiation treatment. And the use of toxic chemicals to kill cancer cells, what's commonly called chemotherapy, was a 1940s development. The dream was to invent a chemical that would kill the cancer cell but spare the normal cell. The problem is that cancers evolve out of normal cells.

They are very close cousins. This woman has cancer of the cervix. Still, given that potential therapies were often as fearsome as the disease itself, a cancer diagnosis came to be cloaked in secrecy, even shame. When my mother was surviving cancer, it was literally unspeakable.

Yeah. What changed that? You couldn't shove it under the carpet anymore. We saw our children dying from it. We saw our parents dying from it.

It had to be a public word because otherwise we couldn't have a conversation. How could there be a war on something you can't name? Which brings us to 1971, when President Richard Nixon did in fact declare war on cancer. I sent a message to the Congress the first of this year, which provided for a national commitment for the conquest of cancer. The war on cancer grew out of a particular optimism around cancer in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Remember, human beings had just walked on the moon. Why don't we cure cancer in 10 years? It was thought very doable.

It turns out that optimism was premature. Key was the realization that a patient's genes could, in effect, be calling the shots. What tells a cell to stop growing or start growing in the first place? The idea that sitting at the center of the puzzle was genes. That was a huge leap because all of a sudden you had a framework to understand cancer. Once researchers began to understand cancer's mechanism, more clues started to fall into place. And the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, led to development of still more treatments, among them individually targeted immunotherapy techniques.

And where are we in the timeline or the arc? The problem remains. How do you target?

How do you kill the cancer cell while sparing normal cells? That was a puzzle in 1920. It was a puzzle in 1970. It's a puzzle in 2017. You have more tools now.

Many, many more tools. The immunotherapies Jane spoke of a moment ago are in the very earliest stages of development. Even so, the effort to unlock the secret within the human immune system is already offering hope to patients for whom traditional treatments have fallen short. Twelve-year-old Ezzie Pineda will tell you what happened to her seems like a miracle. And you're feeling how? Feeling great.

I feel like I could do anything. Back when she was just nine, feeling weak and dizzy, she was taken to a hospital on Long Island where doctors gave her a diagnosis she barely understood, leukemia. I'm like, am I going to die? Am I going to live?

Am I going to be able to do the stuff I did before? Ninety-eight percent of children with this form of cancer respond well to chemotherapy, so her doctors started there. But after four brutal rounds, Ezzie's cancer was getting worse. It was very scary. And a natural reaction is to think, why me?

I was like, what did I do bad so that God could give me this punishment? Desperate and out of options, Ezzie had one last chance. She was enrolled in a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan for an experimental treatment called CAR-T. How's everything? Good. How are you feeling today? Good. After six weeks, Dr. Kevin Curran, the pediatric oncologist who treats Ezzie, couldn't find a single leukemia cell. Not one.

And what did you think? I thought this worked. In a patient who basically ten years ago would have been told there's nothing we can do.

Yes. Ezzie is healthy, just a little puffy from steroids because of a promising new frontier in the war on cancer, immunotherapy. Using a patient's own immune system to find and kill cancer cells. One of the biggest challenges in fighting cancer has been that cancer cells find ways of becoming invisible to the body's defenses, and the immune system can't kill what it can't see. So doctors, in essence, taught Ezzie's immune system to see. They took billions of her white blood cells, cells that normally are good at destroying invaders like bacteria and viruses, but bad at fighting cancer, and turned them into cancer killers. We can take those cells out of the body, genetically modify them, teach them how to fight cancer, and then infuse them back into the patient. It's like they're blood hounds and you give them the scent of the cancer? Exactly.

And then you say, go. Traditional therapies like chemo and radiation often damage healthy tissue along with cancer cells. The hope is immunotherapy will be more targeted and better at sparing normal tissue, but there have been serious side effects, even death.

And once we knew it could work, we've been working around the clock. Dr. Steven Rosenberg has been a pioneer in the field of immunotherapy at the National Cancer Institute for more than four decades. In 1984, he was the first doctor to cure a dying patient using her own immune system.

So these are immune cells. But he'll also be the first to tell you that all these years later, immunotherapy is still in its infancy. We've gotten to the point now where I think we understand why the patients who are successfully treated experience tumor regression, and based on that knowledge, I think we're going to see dramatic progress in the in the next few years to come. But most patients don't have years to wait. Lungs are somewhat compromised.

Yeah. Like 29-year-old Barak Govansoiler, who has a sarcoma, a cancer in the connective tissue near his spine that has spread to his lungs. Now, normal lung would be black. These are all abnormal tumors, every one of these. He has many hundreds of different tumors that are in his lung. Barak has already been through two rounds of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries. He came to us, as do all of our patients, having exhausted what modern medicine can offer.

And our goal is not to practice today's medicine, but to create the medicine of tomorrow. And that, Rosenberg believes, would be immunotherapy. Just as was done with Ezi, Barak's white blood cells were taught in the lab to recognize his specific cancer type. A month later, Barak gets back his juiced up cells, 90 billion of them put into battle. You can just imagine those cells chewing up the tumor when they go in there.

Definitely feeling very hopeful. I mean, you draw the lottery and to actually be part of this trial is just an incredible opportunity in itself. Now he's waiting to see if those cells did their job. Up until now, the highly personalized treatment that patients like Barak and Ezi received has only been available in clinical trials. But by the end of the year, a very similar treatment will most likely be approved by the FDA. And another type of immunotherapy is already available in hospitals across the country. Drugs called checkpoint inhibitors are being used to fight certain types of cancers of the kidney, bladder, and other types of cancer. These are the types of cancers of the kidney, bladder, lungs, and more with especially positive results for melanoma. While effective treatment for widespread or metastatic cancer remains elusive, doctors are hopeful they're at least on the right path. Right now, in the spectrum of cancer treatment, what percentage can be addressed by immunotherapy? If you look at all cancer patients, perhaps 10 percent can be helped by immunotherapy today, but it's getting better every day. Five weeks after his cell transfusion, Barak returned to the National Cancer Institute for a first checkup. I just have that comfort in terms of like I've done everything I can.

Barak, good to see you. Just hoping that we get results that we're seeking in this. So we've gone over the x-rays very carefully. We compared them to the x-rays that you had before we started the treatment, and there was, as you know, rapid growth of the tumor. Now, we want to see these tumors go away, but sometimes that takes time. Sadly, time ran out in Barak's fight against the cancer.

He died two months later. For now, patients like Eze Pineda remain the exception, but doctors Rosenberg and Curran are hopeful and continue to explore the boundaries of this new frontier, one previously incurable patient at a time. So you're lying in bed at night. What's going through your head? That the good thing is that I'm still alive, that I could live with my own life again, that I'll be all better, and probably more stronger than I have been before.

So this is the main entrance. Coming up, cancer clusters. A multitude of potential advances are on the horizon in the field of cancer research, and Susan Spencer will be sampling some of them through the course of the morning. Behold, if you dare, the Israeli death stalker scorpion. Its sting is excruciating, its venom can kill. Not much here to love unless you're Dr. Jim Olson. This sounds terrifying.

It's actually beautiful. Beautiful because the death stalker's venom may revolutionize how cancer surgery is done. Dr. Olson is a brain cancer physician and researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. We were inspired by a 16-year-old girl who had a brain tumor. After 12 hours of surgery, the surgeons left behind a big piece, and we decided that day to find a way to make the cancer light up so that surgeons could see it while they're operating.

The key is the scorpion venom, synthetically reproduced, minus the poison. When injected into a patient's bloodstream, it sticks to cancer cells, but not to normal cells. Combine that sticky molecule with fluorescent dye, and you've got what Olson calls tumor paint. What problem does tumor paint solve? Sometimes it's really hard for a surgeon to tell what is cancer and what is normal. And in the brain, you can't take out a big chunk of normal just to make sure you've got the cancers. And tumor paint distinguishes clearly the difference between brain cancer and normal brain in all of our experiments that we've done so far. Check out this image of a cancerous tumor.

Tell me, did they get enough margin here? I couldn't even tell you. Where's the tumor? Where is the tumor there? But injects tumor paint and there's no mistaking it.

The tumor lights up. This is definitive. I can see why you're excited about this. I'm thrilled about this. You're sort of turning nature upside down, right?

That's exactly what we're doing. Sounds a lot like science fiction, but Olson says it could be an FDA-approved reality as soon as 2019. I think this will potentially be the biggest improvement in cancer surgery, maybe in 50 years.

God bless the Israeli death stalker scorpion, right? Exactly. Well, and God bless our patients because, you know, they're the ones that motivate us to do this. What does it mean when a rare cancer strikes several people in the same area?

Is it a case of cause and effect? Anna Werner takes a closer look at cancer clusters. Do you think, from what you know now, that the contamination is moving? We know it's moving. Dr. Thomas Sherman is on the hunt for a killer. Here's where the landfill is, where this arrow is. He's heading a task force investigating why several children in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire developed a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma, the cancer that took the life of Paul Thomas's 14-year-old son, Sam. It's something missing in your life and it'll always be there. And Paul and his wife, Lynn, say more than two years after Sam's death, questions persist. In your head you're like, why are there three cases that you can go off at the top of your head in the Seacoast area?

Why? New Hampshire says it's a cancer cluster, which the Centers for Disease Control defines as a greater than expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time. And while that definition may be black and white, it turns out that almost everything else is anything but. State health departments get an average of a thousand reports of alleged clusters every year, but historically only a handful are ultimately recognized as true residential cancer clusters. One of those is the 1980s case of Woburn, Massachusetts, a story told by the book and movie, A Civil Action. More than 20 cases of leukemia in children were linked to chemical contamination of the water supply, according to epidemiologist Suzanne Condon, who investigated for the state. How hard is it to figure out if something really is a cancer cluster?

I've been asked that before, and my standard response is extraordinarily difficult at best. Toms River, New Jersey, is another recognized case. But some other notorious incidents often thought to be cancer clusters were not. That includes the California events depicted in the movie Erin Brockovich.

Federal officials toured a section of Niagara Falls, New York today investigating the effects on residents of poisonous chemicals. And the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York. Investigators have to consider several factors, including how often the cancer occurred, how long it took for it to develop, whether genetics might play a role, and one more thing, chance. It seems like people want to say, it just can't be a coincidence. I think people have a hard time understanding that sometimes there are random patterns of disease, and things can happen because of chance. So when it comes to the seacoast cancer cluster? I think they have an incredible challenge before them.

So this is the main entrance. So far, Dr. Sherman and others are focusing their questions on this old closed landfill, where they say the military and others dump toxic wastes. New Hampshire officials say they have found chemicals used to make commercial products in some wells near the landfill. But they say there's no proof they are linked to the suspected seacoast cancer cluster. So every time we find something, it generates a bunch more questions.

And those responsible for the landfill deny there's any connection. But the Thomases still hope for an answer, one that might help save someone else's child. These rare cancers are out there, and I really think that that has to be looked at, so that Sam's death is not in vain. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities, talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at Play.it. For women who've had mastectomies, what to do next is increasingly a matter of choice. And what some women are choosing to do may surprise you. Erin Moriarty of 48 Hours takes what we caution you is a candid look. My name is Debbie Bowers.

I live in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, and I had a double mastectomy. Cancer is not just a killer.

It's a thief. My name is Rebecca Pine. I was diagnosed in 2009 with breast cancer, and I've had a double mastectomy. Each of these women, ranging in age from 34 to 52, have lost breasts to cancer. Yes, it's a loss. It's certainly a loss. And you learn to deal with it in whatever way you can. And it's how these women chose to deal with their loss that is sparking conversation. Fair warning. Some of these images are graphic. They call it going flat.

Instead of replacing their curves with surgical implants, these women are embracing their scars, even burying them publicly. I never saw anybody like me. I never heard about anybody like me. I was like, where are you people? Like, I don't get it. Where, like, I, I've never met a flat person before.

And where are you? That was how Melanie Testa felt six years ago, when she chose not to have reconstructive surgery or to wear removable breast forms. For me, I just don't want to present two bodies. I don't want to walk out of my home with a breasted body and then return to my home and remove my breasts and then have a flat body. I didn't choose to go flat. It chose me.

That's how I look at it. Mary Ann Duquette Quozzo says that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer... Oh, I wanted breasts. I wanted what I had. She went from breast surgeon to plastic surgeon the same day. They did a beautiful job, and I was very happy with them. But Mary Ann, one of the estimated 20 percent, according to doctors who suffer side effects, had infection after infection.

It was just, let's get them out. It's kind of a myth. You know, they're going to pop up on you. It's going to be fine.

They'll be great. It's a myth. There's another myth, says Thedra Culler-Ledford, that reconstructed breasts will feel real. They'll feel like regular breasts to somebody else who's touching them, not to you, to a man perhaps or to whoever. They don't feel like real breasts. There's no feeling. There's no nipple. There's no sensation. On the other hand, Samantha West says after going flat, she gained sensation.

She gained sensation. In terms of sexuality, scars are very tender things, and there's feeling in my chest, and it's still an erogenous zone, which doesn't happen with implants. It's this foreign thing. When you just have a scar there, though, when you take a shower, when you look in the mirror, isn't that a continual reminder that you had cancer? Well, yeah, of course it is.

It's the map of who we are, and I don't want to forget what I've done and what I've been through. Still, more than half of female breast cancer patients, nearly 60 percent who were offered breast reconstruction, take it. I think that for us as surgeons, we feel that if we're going to take a body part off, that we should then replace it with something that looks just as good. Dr. Deborah Axelrod is a surgeon and the director of clinical breast services at New York University's Perlmutter Cancer Center. She says reconstructive surgeries have greatly improved, and yet she agrees that looking good can have some unexpected drawbacks. You know, if you're a stomach sleeper and you have an implant, it's like sleeping on a Frisbee sometimes.

Dr. Axelrod now regularly discusses the option of going flat with her patients. Do you think still the majority of women will choose reconstruction rather than going flat? I do, because it's the image of our bodies. We want to be whole. Beauty is something in the mind and in the heart. These women hope to change that perception. You know, we're just as feminine, we're just as much women as we were before our hand.

There is a growing awareness and acceptance of going flat, they say, this ad campaign for a national gym, a recent fashion show, and websites that offer stories, selfies, and a sisterhood. What it's done for all of us, we can't even express. You're emotional.

Why? Tell me what, but tell me, I want to know. It was about the friendships that we've made. We've made incredible friendships.

Friendships that have helped each woman accept what they have lost and also what they've gained. I love my body. I love my body more than I ever have before. I see the beauty, I see the strength, I see the strength of my conviction. I am not doing that to my body. My body is good enough.

So how did you hear about this trial? Ahead. Truly man's best friend. Okay. Now, small wonders. Children saved from once fatal cancers. Thanks to ongoing research, their ranks are growing by the day. Tracy Smith has a progress report. I need it right here. Okay. When we first met Edie Gilger in 2013, she seemed like your typical healthy four-year-old. What are you doing first? Oh, what's that? It's a cystoscope. You'd never know, she'd just been to hell and back.

There we go. At six months old, Edie was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, cancer of the nerve tissue, with tumors in her spine and belly that were growing out of control. Chemo and surgery weren't working, so doctors threw a Hail Mary pass and gave her an experimental drug that turned off the specific gene in her body that was making her cancer grow. She says it tasted awful, but in less than a month, her cancer was totally gone. She'll be coming from the mountain when she comes. Today, at home in South Carolina, Edie's eight years old and still cancer-free. Parents Nick and Emily are, of course, over the moon. How much medicine is she on? She is not on anything right now. Nothing. Nothing. The good news is that a little girl survived pediatric cancer.

Daddy, daddy. The better news is that it's happening more often. Are we beating childhood cancer? We're making advances in certain childhood cancers that we hadn't envisioned five years ago. Dr. Peter Adamson at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia heads up the nationwide children's oncology group, and he says there's good reason for hope. So let's start with the most common childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL. So in the 1960s, a child with ALL had a less than 10 percent chance of being cured. The same child born today has close to a 90 percent chance of being cured.

So that's dramatic progress in a relatively short span of history. If there's a downside to saving children's lives, it's that most young cancer survivors are in for problems down the road. So a kid survives, but still has consequences for the rest of his or her life?

That's right. We have children who, as teenagers, require hip replacements because of our treatment. Then there are a number of children who, by the time they're in their 20s, early 30s, experience heart failure.

And here's the real zinger. Since more adults get cancer than kids, there's less government research money for childhood cancer cures, far less. The estimate from the National Cancer Institute is about 4 percent of their budget goes to studying childhood cancer.

Why is that so small? There are some who believe that we solved the childhood cancer problem. We haven't. We're curing children today that 10 years ago we knew we couldn't cure. And that only comes through research. So a large chunk of pediatric research money comes from private charities. One of the biggest was started by a young cancer patient, Alex Scott, who raised research money by selling lemonade on her front lawn. Alex died in 2004, but her foundation has attracted thousands of volunteers, this reporter included, and raised more than $100 million to bankroll new treatments like the one that saved Edie Gilger's life. The people at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, who were already big contributors to childhood cancer research, were apparently moved by Edie's story. They even built a float in her honor for this year's Rose Parade in Pasadena, a giant floral sculpture of a blonde former cancer patient just being a little girl again.

How do you feel about all this? Very lucky that they made that medicine, because if they didn't make that medicine, I would be in heaven. And that's something her parents thank heaven for every day. Edie had literally just been rushed to the ICU, and I left the hospital that afternoon, and I looked in the rear view, and I saw Edie's car seat empty, and I remembered that there are people that leave the hospital and they don't get to, you know, put their child in that car seat ever again. When we left the hospital, she came with us, she left with us, you know, that's a big, big thing.

...diagnosed with neuroblastoma at just six months old, and thanks in part to support from Northwest... Broccoli, kale... Ahead... Cabbage... Does diet make a difference? Very healthy... We have some food for thought now about diet and cancer from Martha Teichner. What we're going to do today is a stuffed zucchini with orzo risotto. Chef Eric Levine's eureka moment about healthy food came with his fifth cancer.

It's a numbers game. Yes, he's beaten cancer five times. Ostrich. That moment came on the best and worst day of his life, hours after chemotherapy and medication, barely able even to stand up. He competed on the Food Network show, Chopped.

In the middle of it, I had that, like, moment of clarity where I thought, you know what, I could win this competition and I could beat cancer. Chef Eric, you are the Chopped champion. He did win, but his doctor told him, change the way you eat or die.

So far, he's lost 65 pounds. The relationship of food to health and wellness, it's massive. I didn't get it. Now he wants everybody to get it. He sneaks healthy dishes like this stuffed acorn squash onto the menu at his New Jersey restaurant. When things are jammed down your throat, people resist. I definitely will make this at home.

All these things can work for you. What cancer patients eat matters. Do you prepare meals on days when you're feeling well? Mary Eve Brown is an oncology dietitian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It's been reported that two out of three people when they show up at that very first oncology appointment for treatment are already suffering nutritionally, either undernourished or malnourished. So he had about a quarter of a cup of chicken noodle soup. How did that go? Terrible.

Terrible. Because he was so undernourished, Jack Appelfeld's chemotherapy session had to be canceled. Any time we hold treatment, that has impact on survival. That's how powerful nutrition is during your cancer treatment. So is there evidence that food can actually cause cancer? There's a relationship between high fat meats and certain types of gut cancers. There's even a bigger body of evidence about obesity in cancer.

Female cancers, pancreas cancer. What I like to say, Martha, is eat the rainbow. We want to eat a variety of colorful vegetables and fruits.

This is the power of prevention. Dr. Margaret Cuomo has produced a documentary and a companion book, both called A World Without Cancer. We took a spin around her local supermarket on Long Island. The antioxidants and anti-inflammatory qualities of the vegetables and fruits we're seeing here today are those elements that are going to help us reduce the risk for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases. So says Cuomo, but there is some debate about the role of specific foods in cancer prevention, even organics. Still, she's a believer and says consider organic, but if you gasp at the price. Buy as much as you can afford. It's important that you eat the vegetable. That's the important thing. If you cannot get them organic, you're going to eat the vegetables regardless.

And here's something you may not have thought about. We want to keep to the periphery of a supermarket because the healthier foods are going to be located there. Cuomo says fill your cart with fruits and veggies like tomatoes, peppers, oranges. Broccoli, kale, collards. And she says try green tea.

Green tea is known to have catechins and that has a powerful anti-cancer effect. We have some beans. And what does all that look like on your dinner plate? You want two-thirds of that plate to be consisting of vegetables, whole grains, and fruits with one-third of it protein. That protein can be a bean. It can be black beans, chickpeas, lentils.

It can be a lean protein like fish or poultry. And what do you say to people who say, I hate all that stuff? Learn to like it.

It's good for you. Still to come, Sheryl Crow. My gynecologist called and said there is no six months. Let's get a second opinion. Let's get a needle biopsy. And it turned out it was invasive.

And the warm, wet tongues and the cool fur. The video that's no game. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

PlayIt at Play.It. Beyond Cancer, a special edition of Sunday Morning. Here again is Dr. John Lepook. Topping the charts with hit songs is just one side of Sheryl Crow. Spreading her hard-won knowledge about early cancer detection is another. She talks about that and more with Rita Braver. This is where we're used to seeing Sheryl Crow. On stage with a guitar in her hands.

But she says she's equally at home here. Come right this way. I'm going to bring you into the exam room. Demonstrating how she gets an annual mammogram or breast x-ray. We're going to do a top to bottom view and then we're going to be turning the machine and doing a side view. A subject that was once only whispered about.

Just going to bring the machine up here. Women just didn't speak about their breasts. It was so taboo. Obviously we live in a different day and age. And I feel like I'm in a kind of a rarefied position in that I have a very large fan base of women.

And those women, they've got teenage girls now. It's just great to at least stay on top of your own health. And she makes no bones about being a paid spokesperson for Hologic, which makes 3D imaging machines for mammograms. It can be the difference between a real harsh treatment or something that's early and is ultimately a cure.

Roe has reason to understand the importance of early detection. In 2006, you discovered that you had breast cancer. How did you even learn that you had it? I had a routine mammogram. It was a very inopportune time.

It was right before the Grammys. My personal life was kind of in turmoil, and the last thing I wanted to do was go have a mammogram. But I did. And the result was come back in six months. We've seen something that's kind of suspect, but let's keep an eye on it. And my gynecologist called and said, there is no six months.

You don't wait. Let's go and get a second opinion. Let's get a needle biopsy.

And it turned out it was invasive. Can you remember the emotions that went through your mind? You're young, and suddenly they're telling you that you've got breast cancer?

Yeah, I do. It's like one of those scenes in a movie where all of a sudden it's like, everything's swirling. She said right off the bat, you're not going to die.

This is very early. We'll do lumpectomy and radiation, and you'll get on with your life. It was a life that Sheryl Crow had worked hard to build. Raised in Tennant, Missouri, she worked as a grade school music teacher after college. But on the side, she had a gig singing commercial jingles. In and out, in and out, that's what a hamburger's all about.

All the greats. But in 1986, she decided to try her luck in L.A. It took you a while. Nobody was beating down your door and saying, please, honey, come make us some music. Yeah, every label said we don't know what to do with, you know, a blue-eyed kind of country soul singer.

I was pretty much turned down by everybody. In 1993, she finally broke through. She had a string of hits, eventually racking up nine Grammy Awards. Then in 2006, at age 44, a double whammy. Not only cancer, but the end of her engagement to cyclist Lance Armstrong. The whole saga unfolding publicly. You can work so long and have big selling records, but when your life falls apart, you become like an A celebrity.

You know, suddenly there was a convergence of people being interested in my private life, and that for me was such an intrusion. She had 33 radiation treatments. Every morning I had the opportunity to just lay there with my arm above my head and reassess my life. And when she got a clean bill of health, she decided to take her mom's advice and not wait for marriage to have children. She just said, adopt. Get a surrogate. Your life doesn't have to look like the life you were born into.

And that's what I did. I just thought, you know what, life's so short. She dotes on her two adopted sons. But she's also found time to launch a new line of clothing, which she's peddling on HSN.

Working from her converted barn in Nashville, she's developing pieces based on her all-American style. It's a great way to get clothes out to people who can't afford the $350 jeans, which, you know, I go to my hometown all the time. And that is basically middle America. Those are the people who are more economically strapped.

That's who you want these clothes to appeal to? I think that's kind of who buy my records. The latest record is called Be Myself. She performed one of her album's singles at L.A.'s famed troubadour.

It's called Halfway There. She says the song is about urging people to listen to each other in today's vitriolic political climate. It doesn't matter if you're this person and I'm that person, don't we all want the same thing at the end of the day? But along with the song she sings, Crowe says she'll continue to talk, urging women to get an annual mammogram. I was healthy.

I didn't have any family history. The technology is getting better and better. So at a certain age, take it into your own hands to make sure that you're your advocate.

I look at the opportunity as more of a gift than a responsibility. It's worth being said. Up next, When Silence Can Kill. Beyond cancer.

This is a subject of enormous complexity. And imagine this, a vaccine that can actually prevent cancer if only people would take it. Here's Dr. Tara Narula. One in four Americans, about 80 million of us, are infected with the human papillomavirus, HPV. It's the most common sexually transmitted infection, although most people don't develop symptoms or health problems. But around 30,000 cases of HPV associated cancers occur in the United States every year. HPV is the main cause of cervical cancer in women and the cause of many vulvar, vaginal, throat, tongue, tonsillar, anal and penile cancers. The good news is there's a vaccine for HPV, which can prevent the majority of these cancers. It's recommended for all kids ages 11 or 12 years before they're exposed to the virus, which is when it works best.

Here's the bad news. Only 63 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys are getting the vaccine. It's the most underutilized immunization for children. For cancer doctors, this is a public health crisis.

So who is responsible? The problem lies in part with pediatricians and other providers who haven't been aggressive enough in talking to parents about it. Studies show that a forceful endorsement from a physician is the most important factor in whether children get the vaccine.

But parents are also a big factor here. Many choose to skip the vaccine rather than acknowledge their child will eventually be sexually active. I have cervical cancer. A recent TV ad portrays adults diagnosed with cancer asking their parents who knew that there was something that could have helped protect me from HPV when I was 11 or 12, way before I would even be exposed to it. Did you know, Mom?

Dad? For others, there's concern about the safety of the vaccine, but dozens of studies confirm it's safe. Finally, consider this. Canada, Australia, the UK, even Rwanda have HPV vaccination rates nearly double ours. The CDC has been trying to get the message across. The HPV vaccine prevents cancer. It saves lives. We need to do better at protecting our children from cancers they never need to get.

Next, his toughest battle. The Hippocratic Oath advises doctors to first do no harm. So imagine intentionally using a virus that causes paralysis. That's what doctors are trying for some patients with glioblastoma, the same cancer we just found out Arizona Senator John McCain has.

This disease has never had a more worthy opponent. It was last Wednesday night when McCain's office revealed the diagnosis following surgery to remove a blood clot from the front of his brain. It may explain why the senator seemed somewhat disoriented last month while questioning former FBI Director James Comey.

In the case of Mr. Comey, the present Comey, excuse me, in the case of President Trump. McCain's doctors say the procedure removed any evidence of the tumor on imaging. But the problem with glioblastoma is that microscopic cells have likely already traveled along nerves and spread to other parts of the brain. So this is a disease that tends to recur. Glioblastoma is the same cancer that killed Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. It's different from the more treatable form of cancer that former President Jimmy Carter had, a melanoma that spread to his brain.

As for what comes next, McCain will likely receive a combination of radiation and chemotherapy, which takes the form of a pill that's generally well tolerated. Median patient survival is about 15 months, but that's a number neuro-oncologist Dr. Henry Friedman is working to improve. I think that when you have this diagnosis, you must find a program that will think outside of the box, not just go with the standard approaches, but look for something that pushes the field and hopefully pushes the outcome to a much better place. They're infecting the tumors with polio. As Scott Pelley reported for 60 Minutes in 2015, Friedman is working on a trial at Duke University for patients whose cancer has returned. A genetically engineered form of the polio virus is inserted directly into the brain tumor to, in effect, jumpstart the immune system. And there's no cancer in this picture at all. We don't see any cancer, active cancer cells in the tumor at all. This new therapy is still in its infancy, but Dr. Friedman says the results so far are encouraging.

He and other researchers are just getting started. I believe that we are slowly, inch by inch, making progress in this disease. There is no question that there are patients who are being cured with glioblastoma.

For many of my colleagues around the country who might disagree with me, they of course would be wrong, because it's true. It's a small, incremental population every year, but there are people who can beat this disease. This isn't the first time Senator McCain has battled cancer. He's been treated for melanoma multiple times. But his colleagues in Washington say if there's anyone who can beat it again, it's this former POW and presidential candidate who's shown a fierce will to prevail. Up next, a video game for Joel. A game for Joel is a different sort of video game. It's one family's heartfelt tribute to a lost son, and a reminder, Ben Tracy tells us, of how far the fight against cancer has yet to go.

Was she with someone else, or was it just her and her daughter? Okay, so if you said they moved... It's homework time in the Green household just outside of Denver, and Ryan and Amy Green's kitchen table is definitely full. Do you want to cut these? What do you want to do? Okay, just a minute. Wait, wait, wait. Let me finish this.

But when you look closely at the pictures on their refrigerator, you realize it's not nearly as full as it should be. I know people sometimes will not want to bring him up because they don't want to make us sad, but a lot of ways we'd rather be sad remembering him than have a day pass where we don't think about him. Their son, Joel, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2010. He was just one year old. The tumors left him partially blind and unable to speak, but at first the treatment was working.

They had told us that he had four months to live, and we were a year and a half past that date. It just felt like our prayers were being answered, and we were seeing this miracle, and we thought, oh, we've got to tell people. What does Joel do? What does Joel do? Wawa.

Wawa. In cups, bath, in cups, bathtubs, in the warm, wet tongues, in the warm, wet tongues, in the cool fur of dots. Ryan is a video game developer, so he and his team created a different sort of game. They called it That Dragon Cancer. Hey, do you want to rock? Hey, do you want to rock? Okay, let's rock.

There we go. The impressionistic game chronicles Joel's battle with cancer and the emotional ups and downs of caring for him. Basically, he thinks we should move forward with the radiation.

Basically, he thinks we should move forward with the radiation. It kind of freaks me out. It kind of freaks me out. It could be another miracle. It could be another miracle.

But it's really more about contemplation than competition. While you can make Joel laugh and comfort him... I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry, guys. It's not good.

It is often painfully hard to play. You are there when the greens learn Joel's tumors have returned. Any recurrence means the chemotherapy has failed. And there are times when you can't stop him from crying, like when he is dehydrated and inconsolable after another round of chemotherapy. The first thing that we ever created for the game was a retelling of a night that I spent in the hospital with Joel. And it was one of the hardest nights of my life as a father being unable to do the very thing that I prided myself on, right?

Which is bring comfort to my children. It's so late, Joel. Lay down. I can't hold you. I can't hold you. Can't make you feel better. Can't make you feel better. You know, we both keep using the word game.

It just seems like such an odd term. I would say, no, it's not a game, but there are games in it. And it's not about fun, but there are moments when you have fun. And life is a mixture of the sorrowful and the joyful and the weeping and playing and praying. And so I hope that it's a reflection of our life, you know, in the form of a video game. Joel lived beyond all expectations, yet the miracle story these parents thought they were telling ended in 2014.

He was five. And when he died, the game became our focus. In our grief and in missing him, like we could all as a family kind of rally around finishing the game for him. We went from caring for Joel to making everybody care about Joel.

That dragon cancer became a phenomenon in the gaming community. I think there's a very intense drive as parents to want your children to have some impact on the world. And when you have a child that dies, that's one of the things that you mourn maybe the most is that all of the dreams you had for them don't happen. In creating the game, I think a lot of it was a desire to make sure that Joel's life impacted the world. In the final scene of the game, Joel is surrounded by all of the things he loves, puppies, bubbles, and pancakes. He can finally see and speak. I love bubbles.

Look, I can touch one. He was this fun, delightful boy. And so the idea that whatever heaven looks like and whatever he is experiencing there, that he would be full of delight makes sense to us. It's just not possible to cover all the complexities of cancer in a single morning. So we urge you to go to our Sunday morning website for more information on cancer and the ways we're combating it.

And next week on Sunday morning, Sunday at the Shore. There's no question we're making progress against cancer, but it still has the upper hand way too often. I've lost too many patients to cancer and many of you are undoubtedly touched by it right now.

If we're going to get the upper hand, we have to do better. You may remember President Obama and Vice President Biden's moonshot initiative against cancer, to which I say, let's go to the moon. I'm Dr. John Lapook.

Please join Jane Pauley here again next Sunday morning. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.