Turning the page on cancer
Cambria Heights boy pens book to help raise money for research
WHEN a hospital reached out to a Queens woman to ask if they could use her case of breast cancer to help find a cure, her son wanted to find a way to give back to the hospital.
At 12 years old, DaeQuan Morrison decided to publish a book that he had written two years earlier for his fifth-grade class and donate a portion of the proceeds to the Feinstein Medical Institute, where his mother Patricia was taking part in a clinical trial.
“My mother donated her cancer there, so I wanted to give back and help find a cure for cancer,” said DaeQuan, now 13.
The book, “What’s the Spook?,” follows the story of a boy whose series of escalating nightmares lead him into the underworld. It culminates, DaeQuan said, with the boy’s realization that his closeness to God is the only way to overcome his fears.
The book is based on his own experiences as a child, DaeQuan said, when he suffered from chronic nightmares.
He added that the book was also fitting considering the Cambria Heights family’s struggles watching Patricia battle cancer and undergo treatment.
“When I first wrote about it, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, but when you look at it now you can definitely see it that way,” DaeQuan said.
The clinical trial, which uses microRNAs, small molecules present in many organs and cells that are helpful in regulating genes, to study the way breast cancer acts in 360 patients.
“We didn’t look in the tumor itself because in the tumor itself breast cancer looks exactly the same in every individual,” said Dr. Iuliana Shapira, a researcher at Feinstein. “We wanted to see how the tumor communicates with the host, and how the host communicates with the tumor.”
But Shapira said the researchers stumbled upon an entirely different set of findings.
Shapira and her colleagues presented an abstract to the American Society of Clinical Oncology earlier this month in Chicago proposing that breast cancer behaves much differently in African-American patients than in Caucasians.
“They’re doing a good thing,” said Morrison, 40, who is still undergoing chemotherapy. “I’m still alive, so that’s something.”
DaeQuan has sold over 200 books and hopes to eventually sell as many as 5,000.
“What’s the Spook?” is published by AuthorHouse and is available on Amazon.com and in Barnes & Noble at a cost of $18.