Comment by xiphias2

3 years ago

My ex girlfriend detected breast cancer early at age 28, but the doctors told her that she's ,,too young'' to have cancer. 1 year later on the checkup they said that it's too late (she has BRCA1 mutation). The last 10 years have been fighting with cancer, having about 10 operations on her, but the worst thing was chemotherapy (she said that she would rather die than go through it again, I think the dose had been too large for her probably as well, as she's 44kg). The cancer went away and came back multiple times, and it got so bad that we had to separate, but she's still my best friend (and I didn't find any other person to spend my life with).

She's right now on an experimental checkpoint inhibitor (stage 4 metastatic since a year ago), and it probably gives her another few months, but every time I see her I think that she only has a year left in her life and get sometimes frustrated that the experiments are not optimized to get the more effective treatments in earlier stage.

I sympathize. Cancer, especially in the young, is very tough. Patients really have to aggressively advocate for themselves, which itself comes with risks. And the treatments are devastating. The drug I worked on in grad school is really close to killing people to save them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorouracil

But, recent work with immune treatments for cancer give me hope. I have not seen so many doctors and scientists say things like "the tumor just melted away" before.