Cancer just isn’t the death sentence it once was. Our 5 year survival rates have been steadily climbing for decades and even that data has a 5 year lag. My mom has been maintaining triple negative breast cancer for about 12 years. If she had gotten that in the nineties she wouldn’t have made it 2 years.
Even the way docs talk to patients about cancer has changed dramatically. Unless you walk into the hospital with multiple tumors ravaging your body don’t hear things like “You have 2 years” because almost all cancers are treatable in some way. And most are treatable in a way that if you respond well to treatment, you are going to come away in remission
The real challenge right now with cancer is that it is so unpredictable. The exact same cancer in two different people can behave completely differently or it can just chill in someone for years and then one day show up in every major organ in the body.
But even these cases are the exception and still treatable. My mom has seen her cancer spread to her brain, lungs, kidneys, liver and bones at different points over the past 10 years (triple negative breast cancer is a motherfucker) and every time it spreads her oncologists are able to clear it out and isolate her cancer back to that original tumor. Granted, the docs have said, absent any new trials that show promise for her type of cancer, the original tumor in her breastplate is going to be with her until the end but even so, there are never talks of survival rates or timelines.
Death is just not worth talking about at this point because it’s not a risk. For a 70 year old woman who has had super aggressive cancer for over a decade. That is crazy.
We are beating cancer, rapidly too.
m.jpost.com
