Gabe Grunewald on Running and Cancer Treatment: “I’m Not Throwing in the Towel”

As a challenging year comes to a close, the national champion is targeting new competitive goals in 2018.

By Erin Strout

During the past year, Gabriele Grunewald, 31, has tried to maintain her presence as a professional middle-distance runner while pursuing all available avenues to treat her fourth bout of cancer. It’s been a year of extensive travel, a lot of airports, and many hours in doctors’ offices.

All the while, Grunewald has openly shared her story about her life with adenoid cystic carcinoma, first diagnosed in 2009, when she was an NCAA standout at the University of Minnesota. Her latest recurrence came in March, seven months after she had a large tumor removed from her liver. More small tumors returned to her liver, which did not respond to chemotherapy and have not stabilized this fall during an immunotherapy clinical trial.

Read More

Commentary: How I’m still alive to talk about surviving cancer

By Cathleen McBurney - Special to the American-Statesman
Updated: 10:40 a.m. Friday, May 26, 2017 |  Posted: 12:33 p.m. Friday, May 19, 2017

---

The most astounding part of my cancer story might be that I’m still alive to tell it.

For nearly 10 years, doctors misdiagnosed my persistent jaw pain and trismus as temporomandibular joint dysfunction, or TMJ. Nerve damage to the side of my face was deemed a pinched nerve. Sadly, I believed the doctors and learned to live with the pain. That is, until I woke up one evening with such excruciating, stabbing pain in my face that I finally became my own advocate.

An immediate appointment with a neurologist led to an MRI and subsequent biopsy. The results came back quickly and were as severe as my physical discomfort: I had Stage IV adenoid cystic carcinoma, an extremely rare head and neck cancer that affects roughly 1,600 people in the U.S. each year.

Read More