Perry's Story

To meet Perry Zimmerman, you would think you're meeting a typical, albeit cute and precocious, five-year-old. What you wouldn't know was that Perry has faced and conquered more life-threatening obstacles in her short life than most people could even begin to imagine. Born with a rare cancer of the eye known as retinoblastoma that spread to her brain, Perry successfully fought through five cycles of chemotherapy and one stem cell transplant at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to overcome the cancer. After such an arduous journey made by such a little girl, it is understandable that her parents, Larry and Anne Zimmerman, think of her as their little miracle.

Trilateral retinoblastoma is so rare that Memorial Sloan-Kettering physicians have seen only three cases in the past ten years. "But to put this in perspective," says Dr. Dunkel, Perry's pediatric oncologist, "there were only about 100 patients on medical record in the world as of a few years ago, making this is a very rare illness." In the past, patients treated with less-intensive therapy invariably died. Dr. Dunkel and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering have recently documented that intensive chemotherapy, like the kind Perry received, holds real hope for cure.