Aricca Wallace knew she was nearly out of time. For more than three years, she had suffered cramping and irregular bleeding, which her doctor thought was a side effect of her birth control implant, known as an intrauterine device, or IUD. Her annual Pap smears were always normal, so no one suspected cancer.
Except it was cancer, and by the time the 34-year-old mother of two had the IUD removed and was finally diagnosed, her tumors had reached stage three and the disease was spreading through the lymph nodes in her abdomen and chest.
“I was told by a specialist that there wasn’t any chemo that could kill it,” Wallace told AFP. “And that I’d be gone in a year.”
That was in February 2012. A few months later, Wallace’s doctor told her about an immunotherapy trial at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a research hospital just outside the…
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