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Future of Cancer Care Today (FCCT)

43 points • by gone35 • today at 3:18 AM • 6 comments • view on HN

Comments

keithwarren • today at 4:20 AM

My wife was diagnosed in February with stage 4 invasive lobular breast cancer, peritoneal carcinomatosis with complete bowel obstruction. Surgeons gave her a couple weeks to live.

We went through enhertu which worked for about 3.5 months and relieved the blockage and she was able to eat again and get off IV nutrition. It obstructed again and her markers rose sharply in the summer, we did a course of taxol and are moving to trodelvy next week.

All of this has been entirely predictable, standard of care patterns.

But the standard of care for my wifes disease right now is a march toward death and I refuse to accept that.

I spend my every evening talking to every LLM, practically bargaining and begging for one of them to give me a thread of hope.

I appreciate this service and we will check it out. We are desperate to find something, I recognize ILC is tricky and complete obstruction is usually a death sentence, but we have to try right? She is 49, we have 4 kids.

Anyone out there, any ideas...any longshot, we will do anything.

➕ show 3 replies
xvxvx • today at 4:58 AM

The documentary Forks Over Knives has a segment about people with cancer given days or weeks to live and they follow a whole food vegan diet and live for much, much longer. The documentary was enough for me to instantly give up meat then, a few years later, go full vegan.

I’ve known a few people who were diagnosed with cancer since then and gave them the recommendation but, alarmingly, they weren’t open to giving up meat at all. Horrible chemo and drugs? Ok. No steak? No.

Visited the MD Anderson cancer hospital in Houston with one friend and was hoping their food court had vegan or whole food options. Nope. Only pre-packaged junk food for me. It’s surreal watching people serve up processed meat and red meat to people battling cancer inside the worlds premiere cancer hospital. I feel like I’m in the twilight zone. I could go full nihilist and say that preventing cancer, or combatting it with cheap food found at every supermarket, would put them out of business. Something to think on.

Edit: totally forgot the scene when we first rolled up, with nurses, doctors and staff outside the hospital smoking and vaping. They work at a cancer hospital. What is happening?

https://www.forksoverknives.com/the-film/

dummyvariable • today at 4:51 AM

One of my aunt is detected for lung cancer couple of months ago. Its been hard navigating what options we have. How does this system work? Does anyone have a journey/experience with it?