Speaking Research: Gayla Little and Project LEAD

But she realized that she still wasn’t fluent in Research.  “When I was a social worker, I learned early to speak the language of the people I worked with,” she says.  She is not talking about English, Spanish, or Chinese, but about the way people talk.  She found it wasn’t helpful to use religious language if her clients didn’t.  She had to talk about the subjects that interested them and use metaphors that applied to their own lives.

In August 2007, Gayla had an opportunity to participate in the National Breast Cancer Coalition’s Project LEAD Institute.  These workshops, held in different parts of the country every year, give cancer advocates a chance to learn about breast cancer research and begin to learn how researchers think and talk.  The first two days, Gayla received a crash course in the biology of cancer.  The speakers were research scientists who were excellent at explaining complicated concepts to lay people.  The participants went to a research facility and saw the labs and experiments.  Gayla was dismayed to learn that the results of a lab experiment might take 20 years to turn into a new treatment.

“Participating in Project LEAD taught me to speak the language of researchers,” says Gayla.  The idea is to bridge the gap between the patients who understand what it is like to have cancer and the researchers who are looking for causes and cures.  In November, Gayla will go to Clinical Trials Project LEAD, an advanced four-day course designed to teach people to understand and improve clinical trials research.

The research of the scientists who designed the clinical trial in which Gayla participated helped her become one of the few Stage IV patients with bone mets who achieve NED status for more than five years.  Now she’s using what she learned with Project LEAD to explain about cancer to the women who write and call the IBCRF for information.  She’s speaking Research.