We’re a Lot Better at Fighting Cancer Than We Realized

We’re a Lot Better at Fighting Cancer Than We Realized
cshl.nautil.us

As the partner of someone in the US dealing with stage 4 cancer in their 40s, who has two hospitals fighting with each other over whether to keep using a chemo drug that's sent them into anaphylactic shock twice in two rounds of chemo because it's _more convenient_ for the infusion clinic to administer, and all of that currently held up by pre-approval from a relative-to-the-rest-of-US good insurance company that's still already allowed $40,000 of in-network medical bills to hit us in just 5 weeks since diagnosis all after hitting the supposed out-of-pocket max?

From a cancer that had been misdiagnosed as an infection, an iron deficiency, and a benign tumor for four months prior, to give it a massive head start?

That headline can fuck right and completely off. We might be good at finding new drugs that can fight cancer, but societally we're absolutely shit at fighting this disease.

Having lost two friends in their 30s and 40s to breast cancer in the last decade, I have to say that the system seems incredibly incapable of dealing well with the aggressive cancers that younger people (mostly women) get. There's a lot of bias during critical diagnosis stage that causes these cancers to often ignored until too late because the patient is young and "healthy" (not obese, or whatever) and active. And because these women were younger and still had fairly high metabolisms the cancer grew like wildfire.

I'm in Canada, so different scenario around costs and insurance and the like, but definitely some commonality in health care system dysfunction. In the same period I also lost my still fairly young mother in law to lymphoma that was misdiagnosed as a slow growing mostly-harmless folicular lymphoma.