WASHINGTON - Within a week of finding a lump in her left breast, Lisa Aprati learned she had cancer.

In the almost two years since that revelation, she has endured two surgeries, 4½ months of chemotherapy and 2½ months of radiation treatment.

She’s been taking the breast-cancer drug tamoxifen for five years, but, she said, "as of right now, I am considered cancer-free."

And this week the 36-year-old Chicago Heights resident has come to Washington to show Congress that advances in cancer research are having tangible effects on people’s lives.

"People are actually surviving this," she said.

Aprati is one of thousands of cancer survivors and advocates from across the country who converged on Capitol Hill yesterday to call on lawmakers to restore funding to cancer research programs at the National Institutes of Health.

The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network arranged yesterday’s "Celebration on the Hill" to lobby Congress in the hopes that the Senate and the House will pass a budget that allows for growth in cancer research.

Fierce competition for limited resources has pushed cancer research funding down on the list of budgetary priorities in recent years, said Wendy Selig, vice president of legislative affairs for the American Cancer Society.

"Cancer funding needs to be a continued high priority, and it shouldn’t get pushed down the list," Selig said.

But earlier this year, President George W. Bush proposed a 2007 budget that would cut $40 million from the National Cancer Institute’s $4.8 billion budget for 2006, which cancer research advocates and some lawmakers said would threaten to curtail a cancer research industry that has faced shrinking federal grants, program cuts and an exodus of researchers to other fields and other countries.

Physician John Niederhuber, the newly appointed director of the cancer institute, said budget woes might force the agency to phase out some of its programs.

He added that budget concerns in 2005 and 2006 have caused "significant anxiety" for the cancer research community.

The House delivered a budget in June that included the $40 million cut. In July, the Senate passed its own budget, which gave the NCI a modest $9 million increase.

Advocates have called the Senate’s proposal better than the president’s, but not good enough. The NCI said it needs a $296 million increase just to maintain current operations.