From bodybuilding to beating cancer: Trials, treatment put woman on road to remission

Doctors say cancer, a disease that destroys lives, is getting younger. In 2025, more than 2 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 618,120 people will die from the disease. In North Carolina, cancer is the second leading cause of death, following heart disease. 

“I don’t want to die, so what do we need to do?” Bianca Harvey asks.

Harvey was 34 when she was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. 

“I'm healthy. I was working out. I was in the gym. So it was just like, how did this happen?” she recalls.

Harvey was raised by a military dad who instilled the benefits of fitness and discipline. “We've been doing a lot of exercising, running, all those types of things since I was young,” she says.

As a young mother, she parlayed that fitness into competitive bodybuilding. 

“I placed well, but I didn't win or anything like that. And then just after that, you know, I was like, you know what? I just want to preserve my body because a lot goes into it,” she says. 

But in early 2023, stomach pain sent her to the ER. 

“This is an unbearable pain,” Harvey recalls. “I'm coming home, I'm crying, I'm crawling on the floor.”

A colonoscopy delivered the diagnosis. Colorectal cancer or colon cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among men under 50 and second leading cause of cancer death, after breast cancer, for women under 50.

Still, Harvey was able to stay positive. 

“I tried to be optimistic about it because my dad had just beat colorectal cancer in 2019. I was like, okay, if my dad was okay, then I should be okay too,” she says.

A meeting with her doctor and additional scans revealed the seriousness of her illness – stage four.

Harvey says, “It was distraught news to hear because, you know, most of the time when people think about stage four, it's like you only have a certain amount of time to live. That was very, very, very, very scary.”

She was being treated by Dr. Nicholas DeVito, an oncologist at Duke Cancer Institute, and she remembers his calm when he told her, “We are working on some things.”

Through Duke and DeVito, Harvey participated in two clinical trials, one that lasted for more than a year. 

Now she’s being treated with immunotherapy only. Unlike chemotherapy, which kills rapidly dividing cells like cancer cells but also healthy cells too, immunotherapy helps the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells.

Harvey’s cancer has shrunk by more than 50%.

DeVito believes she will soon be off all treatments, and a cancer that was too risky to remove by surgery will be in remission. 

“That's a remarkable thing to witness,” he said. “When you have a response like Bianca has, where the tumor has continued to shrink over the course of several scans, that her blood work looks great, that she looks great, that she's just continued to feel better the entire time, it's very, very hard to ignore that.”

Harvey has a colonoscopy scheduled for July. She and her doctors are hoping for a clean scan.. 

“If we can't detect it anymore, it would really, really convince me that it's time to ring the bell,” DeVito said.

At many cancer treatment centers, including Duke, patients ring a bell to signal the end of a difficult journey and the beginning of a post-cancer life. 

Harvey says, “We're going to have the party of the century when I can ring that bell. We are going to have a ball. We are going to celebrate.”

Her sacrifice and suffering help others, too. 

DeVito says, “The fact that she's heralded through that and kind of pushed two different trials forward, I want to be clear that I can't see how either of these trials won't contribute to standard of care so she's not only done this for herself, but she's done this for a lot of other people as well.”

“I feel like it is my fight, but it's our fight,” Harvey says.

In addition to her father, Harvey found others in her family tree who had had cancer. She worries, too, about environmental factors. 

She remembers, “When I was a kid, we used to eat a lot of, you know, McDonald's, Burger King, a lot of sweets, all of that type of stuff. And I think that that plays a part in it as well. You know, genetics too, but I do think environmental has a lot to do with it.

“And it's just, it's happening younger and younger and younger and younger.” 

Diagnosis: Young. The New Face of Cancer in NC

 "Diagnosis: Young. The New Face of Cancer in NC" is the latest investigative documentary from the WRAL Doc unit, exploring the alarming trend of cancer striking younger adults in North Carolina and across the nation. The documentary follows three North Carolinians in their 20s and 30s who never expected a cancer diagnosis so early in life. Behind every personal story is the big question: Why is this happening?  

Diagnosis: Young is available on WRAL’s streaming platforms and WRAL’s YouTube channel. It will also air on FOX 50 on Sunday, June 29, at 1 p.m. and on WILM on Sunday, June 29, at 6 p.m.