Is this based on the Emperor of All Maladies? I read that and the descriptions of the breast cancer treatment John Adams's daughter went through made me cry harder than I'd cried at a book since Bridge to Terebithia.
I think she was on there, just not named. They were talking about immunotherapy and showed a younger woman with her parents. Very sorry to hear she passed.
Really? It was an immunotherapy treatment she was doing so very likely it was. They wanted to film her when she was finding out whether the treatment had worked but she declined - I think she suspected it hadn't and it would be too hard to have that filmed.
I don't blame her. Staying positive after getting sucky results is hard! To know you're being filmed would absolutely suck! Nobody needs to be a part of that private moment of you processing scan results.
It made me feel vacillating waves of gratitude and abject horror. And it was completely fascinating.
I had no idea that 50 years ago there was a children's hospital where researchers exclusively worked with kids with leukemia, trying different combinations and doses of rudimentary chemotherapy on them to try and save them. They all died within a few years.
It wasn't until the 1970s that they figured out how to get a 30% long term survival rate.
We are SO LUCKY to live when we do.
Wow, this really puts things into perspective for me and makes me feel even luckier to have my husband. He had leukemia when he was 3 in the mid-70s. He just turned 43 this week He had chemotherapy and total head radiation (as part of a clinical trial) for his treatment.
He had a brain tumor a few years back (most likely a result of the radiation from when he was young) and I'm definitely glad we have more advanced methods of dealing with these types of things now.