Wow. Good luck with everything, MuMu. Glad to hear that there's a chance for a genuinely stable outcome with that kind of cancer. Hope she gets home soon.
Best of wishes to you guys. Prior to my marriage I had my wife stuck in a wheelchair for 1 year due to spine correcting procedure, and while this is incomparable to what are you going through, I sort of know how you feel.
That sucks and I hope things turn out as well as possible.
Make sure you drop at least 25% of your income on faith healers and doctors running clinics in a 3rd-world country to avoid prosecution by the closed-minded establishment. They're your best bet for a positive outcome.
You guys ruined it for yourselves. If you hadn't told her to stay positive, she wouldn't believe that she had a reputation to maintain post-cancer and would have posted a photo of her boobs.
Shit, I had that sinking feeling in my stomach as I was reading your post. Fucking poisoned planet. Best wishes to you and your family and keep your hopes up.
Within 20 years, cancer will be a thing of the past, mostly. My brother in law worked for a company that developed a way to create mice with human immune systems, to harvest antibodies and run trials on; the long and short is that the technology shortened the timeline between idea to trials by exponential levels. His company produced an antibody based cancer treatment (which we now call onco-immunotherapy) and was snapped up by BMS. The new Yervoy product has been proven to be incredibly effective in permanently treating melanoma and some lung cancers, along with 10 others. The amazing part is that it has very few side effects, and is a ~permanent~ solution. The way it works is that it teaches your body to identify cancer as a malignant entity, killing all damaged cells and then killing them the MOMENT they reappear, long after treatment. It's a fucking cure/vaccine. Amazing shit.
I work for an oncology therapeutic company. I admire your enthusiasm, Pete. We can do amazing things. I hope we can continue to progress on meaningful therapies for this horrific illness. Yervoy and its like are amazing, because they have made some cancers that were previously untreatable (e.g., late-stage melanoma is non-responsive to standard chemo regimens) very treatable.
I hope the President's "moonshot" for cancer pays some dividends--an era of personalized therapies could be revolutionary. Science, though, tends to be a slow process, and cancer trials are even more so.
That's kind of the amazing thing about the mice - you basically give the poor little bastards a cancer, then treat it. Like thousands of them, and thousands of trials going on concurrently in these little dudes, all totally human trials. I anticipate that they'll be licensing this tech to everyone and their brother because it's a much faster path to success than the old ways.
I've had some amazing conversations with my BIL about this subject....they are showing that their Yervoy/Somethingorother therapies are effecacious in like 12 cancers now, including breast and distant metastatic breast cancer (why I even mentioned it). Trials are ongoing, apparently, but they've essentially been able to program these wee antibodies to identify specific proteins as pathogens, and the Army of White heads in to eat it.
I always make the joke that this therapy is injected, and your body says, "Oh! Fuck! I have cancer!" then proceeds to digest the cancer. It's not far from the truth. The knock-on of making you immune to that cancer is the real magic, though. I mean, literally, our kids' kids will be getting a vaccine that will eradicate many cancers. Thank God we can go back to dying from morbid obesity and diabetes! I've had family and friends affected by cancer (and I've had skin cancer) so this is a big deal for me.
Unfortunately its bullshit. First of all "cancer" is not one thing, there are thousands of different kinds of cancer with all kinds of underlying histology, root cause and progression. 20 years is a laughably short time to be making any proclamations about the end of anything but a few specific cancers where they're making research advances. This is not something you can then just plug in to a completely different kind of cancer. Research programs dont work on those kind of short timescales. I will happily come back and eat my hat in 20 years but I really wont have to. Because in 20 years time cancer will in no way whatsoever be a thing of the past, despite what someone who worked for a company injecting shit into mice and treating them says, and yeah, we have multinational university collaborative projects doing that EVERY DAY here, making tiny amounts of progress in small areas, all of which are a million miles away from being anything remotely resembling a generic cure for "all human cancers". Its just not that simple, and even if it was, a huge proportion of cancers are detected way too fucking late to do shit about it. That is not the same as injecting a rat and then treating it. Whats much more likely in a 20 year timeframe is more advanced routine screening using various biological markers taken from blood and other samples that will let you get treatments before shit gets fucked up.
I'll be retiring in 21 years anyway, thereabouts, so I will definitely be crossing my fingers for a cushty last year doing fuck all but drinking coffee and scratching my nuts
Best of luck and prayers to you MuMu -- my wife had acute leukemia, so I know how hard this kind of thing can be. Just try to stay as positive as possible.
One of my gaming buddies has a daughter in the midst of Leukemia treatment right now and she had significant DNA testing occur in order to tune the chemo to exactly her situation. Some medical facility in Seattle apparently is the clearing house for this kind of thing. The way things work has changed. I won't go claiming miracles, but things are definitely different from my last close encounter with cancer in 95.
His daughter is keeping a really positive attitude on the whole thing. She was playing King of Tokyo with her dad and mom and when dad announced an attack on her she said, "you can't attack me, I have cancer." She was working him through the whole game, using her illness to influence the outcome. "Do you want that to be the last thing you do playing a boardgame with me ever? You should reconsider." Dad sounded a little proud describing it to me.
you probably mean the Swedish Cancer Institute / Medical Centre?, one of the centres we collaborate in several projects with, my wife was involved in developing some of the advanced radiotherapy techniques there.
We'd looked at Seattle before as somewhere to move to if we ever bodded off to the states (maybe to work with the proton stuff) but now we're getting one built over here in Sweden so the missus will be working with that, and to be honest, every time I've been to the USA I've fucking hated the idea of having to live there, no offence, its just not for me.