I hate that I watched my mom die of something that, had it been caught much earlier, would have just been a blip on the radar of life instead of a total pull of the plug. My cousin died from it too, back in 1999, just five weeks after he was diagnosed. No one even knew he was sick, aside from his immediate family; the word hadn’t spread to the rest of us yet when we got the call that he was gone. And here I am, fifteen years later, living through this again after losing my mom to the same disease that cut his life short in his mid-forties. It’s not right.
Through some internet searching, I found that kidney cancer is the second-lowest funded cancer research effort (from the American Cancer Society). Thyroid cancer is the lowest. Approximately 60,000 people are diagnosed annually and about 20% of that 60,000 die from it. That’s a lot of people and now, my two family members are a part of that statistic. I don’t want them to just be numbers in a very small, and minimal fight. I want them to matter, I want it to mean something. Looking at the data on the ACS website, there is very little for kidney cancer but pages and pages for other cancers like breast and lung. More people die from it, so it’s more important to inform people about it. But what about those that die from the other cancers? Do they not matter??
I want to start a fundraiser for my mom, well in her honor. I know it will take work and time but I want to do it for her. She didn’t have to die if there were actual screening tools for kidney cancer. But there aren’t any. Unless you have a disease which is a direct factor in getting kidney cancer, there are no screening tools. If they find it, it’s typically because they’re looking for something else and they stumble on it. That’s why they didn’t find it in my mom. She had no symptoms other than weight loss and to her, that was great. She loved getting thinner, she prided herself on her shrinking waist-line so she didn’t complain and apparently, neither did the doctors – although no one knows for sure on that one since she saw the doctors alone. It wasn’t until I raised the red flag and her back pain became horrible that they started to piece together the pieces. We had 19 days from the results of the first scan to the end of her life. My cousin was 44 and had two young children at the time he died. How is it that deaths like that do not deserve more research so that another family doesn’t have to go through it?
Why is it okay to underfund one deadly disease and toss tens of millions at another? Yes, breast cancer is the most prevalent and I know that statistically, at least one of my girlfriends will have it in our lifetime. But that doesn’t take the sting out. It’s as if the death of someone with breast cancer is more worthy, more important, than someone with some other and less frequently diagnosed cancer. How is that okay? My mother-in-law had breast cancer about three years ago and it was at least stage two or three, and she is still here. The treatments really are amazing now and they save a lot of lives. I just wish that was the case across the board, for all cancers. Maybe my mom and my cousin would still be here too.
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