Finding A Cure Wouldn’t Mean We’ve Defeated Cancer

WebMD wasn't a research option when Ivy Brown was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1974, so her mother looked up her 12-year-old daughter's condition the old-fashioned way, in a hardcover medical volume. "It just said 'fatal,'" Brown explained. Having moved the family to London a month earlier, Brown's parents were still trying to liaise with her pediatrician in the U.S. "My father told me recently that he was sleeping with the phone on his stomach because of the time change," she said. "They were as scared as you can be when you have a child who you think you might lose," Brown explained. "It was devastating for them." Robin Glassman was also 12 when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's in 1972. Her mother wouldn't let her read the disease's description.  While the prognosis for Hodgkin's, an immune system cancer, is excellent -- it's considered one of the most curable cancers, with 10-year survival rates of about 80 percent -- that wasn't the case fifty years ago. In the 1960s, only 1 in 10 Hodgkin's patients were expected to survive for five years. Today, the two women are among the first generation of what's referred to as "long-term childhood cancer survivors" -- kids who were diagnosed in the 1970s and lived for at least five years after their initial diagnosis, a benchmark that their peers born just 10 years earlier would not have likely lived to reach. The women's scars are shown here in powerful photos that capture both the fragility and the resil...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news