# @elilillyco on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CjA68c4riOY
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/64294515-elilillyco-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/3c49421f8c.jpg
- **Posted:** 2022-09-27T14:59:23.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Eli Lilly and Company (@elilillyco) — https://gondola.cc/elilillyco

## Caption

#WeAreLilly - 35,000 global employees #PoweredbyPurpose

“I began working in healthcare communications in the early 1990s, following a 12-year career as a television news anchor/reporter. Over the last 25 years, I have held roles across the healthcare landscape, communicating how a new treatment, test or medical device would improve patients' lives. The chance to tell those stories at Lilly is the opportunity of a lifetime.
 
It is a life challenged twice by cancer. I was diagnosed with stage 1 B-cell lymphoma at age 36. Three rounds of chemo and a month of radiation therapy seemed to do the trick. But in 2014, when I had been in complete remission for more than 18 years, I began suffering acute abdominal pain. That's when I was diagnosed with five tumors caused by a rare lymphoma called PTCL – peripheral T-cell lymphoma – in my small intestine.
 
Chemo and a medicine that Lilly developed half a century earlier killed the tumors. But then a small intestine perforation resulted in overnight emergency surgery, leaving me with an ileostomy bag for two years. A painful, physically devastating stem cell rescue followed, as I received a week of continuous high-dose chemotherapy to kill my bone marrow without killing me. A previous harvest of 6 million of my cancer-free stem cells was infused into me. Fortunately, during a month-long stay in an isolation room in a hospital transplant unit, my cells grafted. If they hadn't, I would have died.
 
While I am cancer-free, it has been a hard road back with many side effects and follow-up surgeries. But I am fortunate. Only about 1 in 20 people with my diagnosis are alive and cancer-free after eight years. It is gratifying to work at Lilly, where researchers at Loxo@Lilly are pioneering new treatments for lymphoma that may one day lead to a more effective treatment for the type of lymphoma that nearly killed me.
 
My colleagues at Lilly unite caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world — THAT fuels my purpose.” #FightBloodCancer

John Gillespie
Associate Director, Innovation Communications

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## Tags

poweredbypurpose, wearelilly, fightbloodcancer

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