Meet the Advocate: Bruce Wright

For military veterans, the answer is sometimes more agonizing – it’s possible or even likely that it resulted from toxins they came into contact with while serving their country.

SWOG patient advocate Bruce Wright believes Agent Orange is likely the culprit that led  to his cancer diagnoses. 

Bruce is a retired commander with the U.S. Navy. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1967, then served three tours of duty in Vietnam over the next six years. After a first tour as gunnery officer on a destroyer, he learned how to fly the F-4 Phantom II and did two subsequent tours. He also completed the Navy’s Top Gun program. 

After learning in 2009 that he had served in areas in Vietnam where Agent Orange had been used, he had a blood draw at a VA medical center screening visit. Tests on that sample led him to not one but two cancer diagnoses. 

A high reading for prostate specific antigen was followed by a biopsy and a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Brachytherapy put that cancer into remission in 2012.

But the test also led him to a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).   

In the years since, he’s learned more than he ever wanted to know about the disease, but at the time he was diagnosed, it was a mystery. The initial advice he got with his diagnosis was “just Google it.”

“Dr. Google at the time said my life span was going to be five years,” he recalls, more than 15 years later.

Via Google he found an excess of misinformation, and learned that there was no single authoritative resource those newly diagnosed with the disease could turn to to help them make sense of it.

So he turned to others with the disease, joining a patient support group in 2010 that would several years later morph into the CLL Society, now the world’s largest organization dedicated to support, education, and advocacy for those with CLL or SLL (small lymphocytic lymphoma). 

Bruce has served in several leadership roles over more than a decade of service with the CLL Society and is now a senior advisor overseeing groups that serve hundreds of patients. He also chairs the CLL Society’s patient advisory board and is the organization’s liaison for military veterans with CLL.

Many of the vets that role has put him in touch with face not only the challenges of living with leukemia but also the frustrations of pursuing disability claims with a huge and in many ways under-resourced bureaucracy – the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), which oversees disability assignments and determines compensation. 

Bruce’s memory of his own three-year fight with the VBA to get his disability claims approved has driven him to become not only patient advocate but also VBA navigator for many such vets. To date, he has helped more than 100 of them successfully navigate the disability benefits odyssey.

“I don’t have any magic wand,” he says, but “I’ve had success, I’m going to pay it forward.”

In 2020, Bruce learned SWOG was looking for patient advocates and applied, making clear he would help anywhere help was needed. His deep ties and experience with veterans’ health issues made him a great fit for SWOG’s new advocate role representing the veteran community and aiding our efforts to bring more veterans more access to more NCTN trials.

His history with CLL also has led to his being tapped at times to work alongside his SWOG mentor, leukemia patient advocate Gail Sperling, on trials within that committee.

He’s also collaborated with Leslie Weissenstein, our VA program manager, on plans for the group’s participation at the annual conference of the Association of VA Hematology/Oncology, or AVAHO (this year’s AVAHO meeting opens next Thursday!)  

Under the care of a hematologist at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego, he was prescribed a six-month regimen of obinutuzumab that put his disease into a remission that lasted seven years. Since a follow-on course of the same drug in 2021, his CLL has remained in remission. 

“Pure and simple, I am alive today because of a clinical trial,” he says, drawing the connection between his treatment and the research he supports as a SWOG patient advocate. 

SWOG is so grateful, Bruce, for your continued service to our country and our patients.