‘The most exciting time of the year’ for cancer patients in the US
“I had just had my first child, and I was a single mom.
I had a great career and a house.
I’d had everything.”
But just two years earlier, she had suffered an early diagnosis of lung cancer and her health was in decline.
She had been told she had one to two years to live, but she was told she could live a “normal life” with minimal chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
It was a heartbreaking situation, she says.
“The doctor who saw me first, he was telling me I could go home.
I could do that.
He said, ‘No, you have to have a plan for when you are done with chemotherapy.
You are going to need time off’.
I said, that’s just not going to happen, you can’t do that.”
Her husband died soon after, and she was left to care for their four children and four grandkids.
“I was very worried about my health, because I knew I could be out of work and I knew the world was not going back to normal,” she says, adding that her life was about to be destroyed.
The US has seen a dramatic rise in the number of people with cancer since the pandemic began.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2017 there were 1.1 million new cases of cancer and 5.3 million new deaths, which is more than triple the number in 2016.
The number of new cancer cases in the country rose from about 6,000 in 2016 to almost 8,000 the following year, according to a report by the US National Cancer Institute.
But there is no data on how many people have died in the pandemics so far.
And the number is far lower than what the World Health Organisation expects.
For many, the news of cancer diagnosis is the hardest thing to deal with.
In the UK, a study released in March 2017 found that about 10,000 people have a diagnosis of cancer every week.
The World Health Organization has warned that the pandems’ effects on public health are already starting to show.
It has warned of an increased risk of severe illness and death from influenza, a respiratory disease that can be spread by coughing and sneezing, as well as by drinking contaminated water and food.
“There’s a real risk of a lot of the early cancers being missed, and the fact that we have this new pandemic, the fact we have so many cases, the very real possibility of this happening again,” says Dr Sam Dangos, the chief of the Division of Medical Genetics and the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington.
“It’s going to have to be something we’re very conscious of as we move forward.”
Topics:cancer,cancer-and-healing,public-health,united-states