Randi Cummings
In 2021, Randi Cummings left her longtime New York home – with its litany of world-class medical facilities – to move to Birmingham after her daughter and son-in-law took research positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Two years later, Cummings was diagnosed with stage T2b gallbladder cancer.
By then, Cummings had become confident in the quality of care available at the UAB O’Neal Cancer Center; not only did she remain in Birmingham for treatment instead of returning to New York, she agreed to participate in a clinical trial.
“I could have gone back to Manhattan, but I was very comfortable staying here,” Cummings says. “I was happy with the people at UAB, so I wasn’t about to go anywhere else.”
The current standard-of-care treatment for Cummings’s type of cancer is a liver resection to determine the scope of the cancer, followed by two consecutive eight-week rounds of chemotherapy. But due to the toxicity of this regimen, UAB surgical oncologist J. Bart Rose, M.D., suggested that Cummings enroll in a clinical trial in which she would undergo a single eight-week round of chemo, then have the liver resection followed by additional chemo as needed.
“Dr. Rose was wonderful in explaining everything,” Cummings says. “I discussed it with my daughter and son-in-law, and we decided there was no downside to trying it.”
Sure enough, by splitting the chemo treatments, Cummings says the side effects were kept to a minimum. “I got a little bit sick from it, but it was nothing horrible,” she says. “I really didn’t feel that bad.”
For two years following her second round of chemotherapy, Cummings returned to UAB for a cancer scan once every three months. She was cancer-free each time, and so her scans were reduced to once every six months.
“I meet with the physician’s assistant each time [after the follow-up scans], so we’re pretty good friends by now,” Cummings says. “Everyone at UAB – all the nurses and doctors – have been absolutely amazing. Everyone has answered any questions I’ve had. They’ve all done their best to make me feel comfortable.”
Rose says researchers are still gathering and analyzing data from this clinical trial, so it remains undetermined whether there are any significant advantages to splitting the chemo treatments. But while he cannot say for certain that Cummings benefitted from that approach, Rose says that is not necessarily the purpose of this trial.
“Her case highlights that there are a lot of clinical trials that are not going to directly benefit the patients who are in them, but they’re designed to answers questions that we sometimes don’t know the answers to yet,” Rose says. “Is this way of combining treatments better than another?
“This was really a trial that is for the betterment of society, not necessarily just for her. She’s a very altruistic person who recognized that. There are a lot of people like that who are willing to participate in these types of trials because they want to help their family, their friends, their neighbors. Anyone else who has to go through what they’re going through, they want it to be better for them.”