Photography by Stephen Buchanan
When Dian “CJ” Corneliussen-James first was first diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in 2004, she was overwhelmed with all the support she received. It started right before her operation at Anne Arundel Medical Center.
A volunteer came into her room with a bag of gifts. The hospital assigned her a mentor for the entire year as she went through follow-up treatments. “It was really a fantastic program,” says Corneliussen-James, who spent 24 years in the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence officer with several long postings overseas and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Fast forward to 2006 when her cancer returned. This time, the Annapolis resident had a totally different experience. At that point, she was back in the same hospital, with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. “I was laying on the gurney waiting to have a lobe of my lung taken out,” she says. “They told me I had about two to three years to live.”
The difference this go-round was that there were no gifts, support, or mentors. The hospital didn’t have a volunteer support program for Stage 4 breast cancer patients similar to the one for Stage 2. “No one came into my room to offer me help or to be a mentor,” Corneliussen-James recalls. “There was nothing there.” This for a disease with a survival rate of only 1–3 percent.
Luckily, the 70-year-old beat the odds, has remained cancer-free, and gone on to lead a normal life. Shortly after her second surgery she found out through research that no metastatic Stage 4 breast cancer support system existed anywhere in the country.
“I thought that was outrageous and very unfair,” she says. “The world turns out for you when you have this early-stage diagnosis. But when you are told you are going to die, there is no one there for you.”
Corneliussen-James soon set out to change that. She started by asking hospital officials to put her in touch with other metastatic patients, which they did.
“They connected me with three patients (in December 2006), and within two months all three were dead,” Corneliussen-James says. “It was not a good start.
“In January of 2007, I heard a media report that the National Cancer Institute was putting less than half of one percent of their five-billion-dollar budget into research for all stage four cancers combined,” Corneliussen-James recalls. “That really threw me. That’s when I decided we have got to find some way to raise money ourselves because they are not doing it.”
In September 2007, after undergoing formal training as a breast cancer volunteer, she made things official by launching her own regional program, Survivors Offering Support (SOS). “In just six months I had 24 members and it showed how great the need was,” Corneliussen-James says. She didn’t stop there. Two years later, in January 2009, Corneliussen-James chose three patients in her support group to join her in founding the 501(c)3 nonprofit, METAvivor Research and Support. To raise funds more quickly, it set the policy that 100 percent of every donation would go into its research grants. That policy remains in effect. Tragically, the three other founders, Karen Presswood, Rhonda Rhodes, and Avis Halberstadt, passed away in 2009, 2010, and 2014 respectively.
“She was definitely on a mission to improve the quality of life for people living with metastatic breast cancer,” METAvivor Executive Director Sonya Negley says. “She also wanted to improve the amount of research for metastatic breast cancer.
“One thing that was inspiring is that she shared this with everybody who listened and encouraged advocacy and people to volunteer. And to this day, (the program) is still in place.”
She and her colleagues at METAvivor have accomplished that mission. Since 2009, the organization has raised more than $18 million through fundraisers and donations. That money has gone into 185 research grants.
After co-founding METAvivor, Corneliussen-James, who holds a B.A. in German literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master’s degree in international management from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, served as president of the national chapter for six years, until 2015.
In 2011, she joined the Global Alliance for Metastatic Breast Cancer. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, she served on faculty through 2017, giving the Keynote in 2015.
“The success of the organization has been astounding,” says Kelly Lange, who served on METAvivor’s national board of directors for a decade. “And a lot was due to her vision. Her message definitely resonated.”
Lange offers a dramatic example. “I will always remember going to a conference in Philadelphia and people had our logo tattooed on their bodies because of our organization and everything it meant to them.”
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