I have learnt that effective cancer treatment can be life-saving.
I have also learnt that surviving cancer is profoundly life-limiting.
My life was saved by the very best of our reactive model of cancer care, and I live with its costs every day. These costs have at times been extreme. Because of the urgency of my diagnosis, I was not able to store a sperm sample and, when I was later offered the chance after treatment, little remained. There are many parts of the world I will probably never visit because I need to remain within reach of hospitals in case of obstruction. Because of my acquired anatomy, I develop many kidney infections each year, travel with prophylactic antibiotics and live with regular discomfort. Yet I am alive, and that was not expected.
I belong to a transitional generation. My parents’ generation faced cancer largely as a death sentence. Mine faces it as survivable but devastating, a bargain in which you trade your body and your simplest pleasures for the right to keep breathing.
The question now is whether the generation after mine will have to make that same bargain, or whether we will have had the courage to spare them from it entirely.
We need healthcare systems to understand that without prevention, the projected rise in cancer cases will overwhelm them. And we need political leaders to fund cancer prevention not as a footnote to treatment budgets but as a priority in line with what is at stake: millions of lives that need never be disrupted, diminished or destroyed by this disease.
Prevention….Prevention….Prevention
Lynch Syndrome Ireland 