Dear Ella,
My "cancer" radar immediately picked up the words "new ways to treat cancer" on the radio this morning. (Sometimes, I think the word cancer hunts me out, tracks me down and then stops me dead in my tracks).
Anyway, not sure I really understood the full interview - but in the most basic terms it was explaining that cancer continues to challenge the medical and research world and there is no such thing as a specific cancer. Even when a biopsy is done and a cancer is diagnosed, it can change again during treatment and and may even be different if the biopsy is taken from a sightly different angle.
There were words and terms like "daughter cells ," "no single entity", "genetic architecture", "mutation", "naturally selected" "multiple, diverse cancers -not one cancer", "founding cells".
It made me realise just how crude your treatment was - blasting away as best as they could, but very unsophisticated and of course no alternative but to go down that route. At least it gave you another 18 months and kept you relatively pain free - despite all the time in hospital and the scares, tears and trauma that bought.
The phrase "mountain to climb" was used - does that sound familiar?
1:3 people in the western world will be diagnosed with cancer and 1:5 will die from cancer. Why were you one of the ones?
With love
Mum
xx
Yes, I picked up on some of the recent coverage. They are trying to better understand how tumours evolve, which is one of the processes that can make a incidence of cancer so different in one person from another, despite a similar starting point, love U Bob
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