By Torrence Banks,
Special to the AFRO
Laura Crandon was 47 when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. The hard lump she found during a routine self-exam in the shower came only five months after she had an inconclusive mammogram. The year was 2016.
A year later, Crandon thought she had the disease defeated. But in 2018 it returned– this time metastasizing into her brain and altering the course of her life forever.
After her experience with the disease, Crandon began talking to her friends. The conversations gave her life a new meaning.
Crandon became alarmed when she realized none of her friends knew about the process of getting breast cancer screenings. She started thinking about the ways that she could help them and other women decrease their risk of dying from the disease.
Crandon knew that she had the power to promote change and she went to work.
In 2019, she started writing a business plan for her nonprofit to fill the gap for Black women like herself. She named it Touch4Life. The goal: to heighten breast health knowledge in underserved communities and communities of color.
Throughout that year, she started attending health fairs under the organization’s name and passing out information on breast health to women. Touch4Life works with other nonprofits and community organizations to educate women on the risk factors of breast cancer and the types of testing they should receive.
In the last four years, the nonprofit has had a substantial impact on women’s lives. More than 2,500 women have attended community events that Touch4Life has been connected with. At the events that Touch4Life has been the sponsor at, 100 mammograms have been performed.
Touch4Life also communicates with pharmaceutical and genetic companies to ensure that companies are being inclusive in clinical trials as well as genetic and genomic testing.
The organization’s work has attracted more than a dozen funders, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins Medicine.
She uses her more than 15 years of experience as a healthcare executive to volunteer with Touch4Life. Crandon also serves on the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange board, an agency whose goal is to connect Marylanders to affordable healthcare coverage. She was appointed to the board by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore in 2023.
In a conversation with the AFRO, Crandon talked about the inspiration behind her work today, her experience dealing with cancer and her service to others through Touch4Life.
Q: Describe the moment when you first found that you had a cancer lump in 2016. What thoughts were initially in your head?
A: I found it myself doing a self-exam in the shower. It was on one side and not the other. It was more like a welt, sort of like a mosquito bite. I had to have an ultrasound-guided biopsy, and then I got the call from the doctor’s office that it was indeed cancerous.
Q: Can you talk about your “inner circle” you had to support you during your first battle with cancer?
A: I didn’t really tell anyone. I didn’t want it to define me as ‘Laura the cancer patient.’ I didn’t want people to have pity on me because I was really intent on surviving and healing and being healthy.
The treatment for that first diagnosis was really brutal. My hair fell out. not to tell a lot of people at work either. I would take conference calls lying in the fusion center–things like that. My sister and my husband were at most of my chemo appointments.
Q: Did anyone from the job that you were working at the time notice that anything was going on?
A: I told my boss. She knew, and one of my close colleagues knew and kind of looked out for me. But, I really tried to not let it be all-consuming. I thought I did a pretty good job of hiding it. But obviously, I was weak and not myself. I remember being out at a team meeting in California. Coming back, I had to get the cart because there was no way I could walk from TSA to the gate. I was just too weak.
Q: At what point did you decide that you should let other people know?
A: My best friend told me that my husband was really struggling because I didn’t want people to know. When I told him not to tell anyone, he had no outlet–no one to talk to. She told me that you’ve got to let people know. That really loosened it up. From that point on, I learned that it’s okay to let people love you.
Q: Did your mindset change when you had cancer a second time in 2018?
A: Definitely! I didn’t care who knew at that point. It was very scary because the prognosis at that time was literally 24 months.
Q: How did you go about treatment every day given your prognosis?
A: I had to have brain surgery, radiation to the brain, and then medication. So it changed everything because I had gone from being you know what I thought was cancer-free to being restricted to having this medication for the rest of my life. I also went into research mode, which was what is this? How do I attack this? How do I live? But the other key thing for me was getting connected with a behavioral health therapist who specialized in medical conditions. So that was key, from a mental health perspective.
Q: At the time of your first diagnosis, did you know anything about cancer? Did it run in your family?
A: My parents lived to be 97, 96. I always thought I had really good genes. Genetics only makes up a certain portion of your health. It’s still important because that portion that it does makeup can make a lot of difference. But no cancer didn’t run in our family.
Q: What made you want to start Touch4Life?
A: I had seen one of my sorority sisters at a regional conference and within a few months she was dead. It was “de novo,” meaning it was the first time she has been diagnosed with cancer, and it was metastatic. The first time she found out that she had cancer, it had spread. So that spoke to me.
I thought “What happened there? Why wasn’t there a screening of something that could have maybe prevented it or treated it early on when it’s more curable?
Q: What are the most important resources that Touch4Life offers?
A: We do a monthly series called SOS–that stands for Soul-filling Our Sisters. So we bring the top experts from around the country. It’s a webcast from around the country to talk about topics that are important to the traditionally marginalized community. We bring people with lived experience, so it’s one hour, once a month. And the topics vary.
Q: You received access to genetic testing and whole genome sequencing, which is the reason you’re here today. Why do you feel that more women of color need to get access to that type of testing?
A: Doctors don’t just offer it. At least that’s what the data shows. I asked a lot of questions and did a lot of research.
Q: On the Touch4Life website, it mentions that CDK inhibitor treatments are important in helping stop cell division, and research shows that Black women could benefit from getting that treatment earlier. What is the argument for preventing women from getting this treatment earlier?
A: I don’t know a valid one. In some cases, policies are made based on the clinical trials. And if we’re not in the clinical trials, these policies get set. For example, annual mammograms at the age of 40, let’s say that’s the standard. I mentioned that Black women get breast cancer under the age of 35 at a higher rate. What that standard procedure of testing at age 40 says to me is that there weren’t enough Black women in the trial because if they were, that age would probably come down. The standards get set without us in mind, but apply to us.
Q: Can you explain how the lack of inclusivity in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies impacts African Americans?
A: One of the medications I took. I was sitting at the dinner table and my youngest son said, ‘Mom, why are your hands black?’ I looked and they were like black. I thought I was going into organ failure.
What that says to me is that no one melanated or not enough melanated people were in that clinical trial for the drug. So when I take it, does it work for me? When the drug companies are looking for the mutations that are driving cancer, if Black, biodata isn’t in the dataset, then what they’re looking for isn’t what’s driving us to have cancer at higher rates and younger ages.
Q: What are your long-term goals for Touch4Life?
A: I want to reach millions of people with the message that we have around the importance of family health history, genetic testing, and biomarker testing. So that people can get precision oncology. I also want to continue getting funding to continue to deliver the programs that the community tells us based on our survey data are really valuable, really informative and really change lives.