My wife is 47. Got diagnosed with breast cancer about 14 months ago. It's the very aggressive triple negative type. Apparently it grows extremely fast. Due to family history she got checked often and it was found just as it entered Stage 2. Without regular checkups it would have been a whole lot worse and a likely death sentence.

Then cam 3 months of weekly chemo, followed by 3 months of a more aggressive chemo every 3 weeks. Then some recovery and a double mastectomy. 2 months to recover from that and the post surgery examination of the tissue showed the tumor was still there. It had shrunk but not as much as was hoped. It never went to her lymph nodes so it's unlikely any cancer spread. But it still meant 6 more months of daily chemo through pills (2 weeks daily, 1 week off, rinse and repeat). She made it about 4 months before the side effects were causing some pretty bad problems which isn't uncommon. Her oncologist said she got everything she could out of that and stopped that treatment. Now she's on the road to recovery and will get a check up every 3 months.

The scary thing is that type of cancer can come back. Not in the breast tissue since 99.9% of it was removed (which means there is an extremely small chance it could reappear in the breast). But it comes back in the bones and other places. I think the 10 year survival rates for someone with her cancer and the post op tumor study is in the low 60%s. The good news is that the last round of chemo should add 10% or so to that number. And those studies are always 5-10 years old so things get better. One example is a very new drug (Keytruda) that she took for a full year that should help those numbers as well. I think there's some kind of drug(s) that cancer survivors take for years after treatment to keep the odds of it coming back but it doesn't work in her case.

On top of that she's now an expert on everything that causes cancer and is actively doing everything she can. Exercising every day (which she was good at before chemo) is big. Most everything we buy now is organic, free range, ect. Red meat is a once every couple of weeks thing for her and pork is out with the exception of pancetta once in a blue moon in a cheat pasta. Even chicken is limited as she eats mostly vegetables. Alcohol for her is completely out for at least 5 years. And so much more that I'm either not aware of or don't know enough to intelligently discuss.

What's scary is the doctors don't do anything as far as regular scans. And she has one of the top doctors in the area and is nationally known. His explanation is that a full body scan is pretty much always going to show something even if it's a false positive and that tends to also have a debilitating effect on a patient's morale over time. They look at blood work mostly along with any issues specifically brought up by the patient. Knowing her cancer has a not uncommon chance of coming back feels like rolling the dice but I guess it is what it is.

On the bright side it's helped me start to make more changes in the way I eat and live. I'm not going to the extreme she is, but then again I didn't look down the barrel of the gun either. It's also a wake up call that life is short. Pop culture would call us DINKs (dual income, no kids) and we've done a good job of saving for retirement. The plan now is to push to retire in the next 5 or so years and enjoy life because nothing is guaranteed and the odds are what the odds are in our case.

Don't know why I just typed all of that out as it's pretty off topic. I don't really talk about it a lot so it's somewhat cathartic just to put it down.