My most fascinating experience this year, other than catching a glimpse of the sun’s corona? I joined a clinical trial. I’ll be honest. When somebody multiple years into their cancer treatment enters a clinical trial, it is typically the result of learning some bad news. I’ll start with the bad, but I want to make it clear: I believe that entering this trial might well have been the very best thing that happened to me in 2024.

25 years ago, many different diseases were lumped together into a single diagnosis: lung cancer. Even though it was possible to classify a patient’s tumor by the appearance of cells under a microscope, this knowledge was of limited utility. It did not radically affect treatment, and patients with advanced lung cancer generally lived for about one year, regardless of whether they received chemotherapy or went without it. We were living in what were effectively the dark ages of lung cancer.