If you are diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, you’re not alone. About 700,000 Americans are living with a brain tumor, and 80% of primary brain tumors  — tumors that began in the brain and did not spread from somewhere else in the body — are benign. But if a tumor is not cancerous, do you have to do anything about it?

When she was almost 11, Kayla was mysteriously sick for two months. First her doctors thought she had a cold or mono, and then a stomach bug. Her blood work showed that her white blood cell count was through the roof.

What do you do when — after planning your life and working hard to achieve your dreams — your plans are interrupted by cancer?

One spring day in 2012, Janice woke up with a horrible headache. Because her mom had had a brain aneurysm at a young age, Janice paid attention and called her husband. By dinnertime that day, she was coming out of brain surgery.

From the day Roswell Park was founded in 1898, we’ve focused exclusively on understanding, preventing and treating cancer. But along the way, our work has led to major benefits for patients with other medical conditions — and created valuable tools for researchers in other fields of healthcare.

Christine Pieri graduated from nursing school on a Saturday and started work at Roswell Park the following Monday. In those early days, “I didn’t know much about oncology,” she says, “but once I got here, that became my passion."

One reason this finding is so exciting is that we can now focus on the X chromosome to find the gene mutations that put women at higher risk of ovarian cancer and men at higher risk of testicular cancer.

Prospective employers expressed doubt that she was really a nurse or emphasized that even if she were hired, she would not receive the same pay as the white nurses and would have to eat alone, in the kitchen. Those roadblocks were no match for the determination of Eva Bateman.