Many people are perfectly healthy before one cancer cell appears in their body. I guess that is also what sadly happened to my ex-wife.
IT STARTS WITH A CELL
It essentially starts with one single cell.
Human bodies are made up of more than 100,000,000,000,000 cells. Cancer starts with changes in one cell or a small group of cells:[1]
Usually, we have just the right number of each type of cell. This is because cells produce signals to control how much and how often the cells divide. If any of these signals are faulty or missing, cells might start to grow and multiply too much and form a lump called a tumor.
And that’s what the unfortunate thing is: one single cell can lead to the downfall of your entire body.
Cells can become faulty because of smoking cigarettes, alcohol abuse, or being exposed to certain chemicals.
But sometimes, the bad stuff comes from inside.
BRCA GENE MUTATIONS
You might have heard from “BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes” — BReast CAncer genes. Everyone — male and female — has them.
They are called “tumor suppressor genes” because they stop our cells from growing and dividing out of control, so they are really, really important.
But if your BRCA genes are faulty (mutated), then you have a (highly) increased chance to develop different types of cancer, including:
- breast cancer,
- ovarian cancer,
- prostate cancer,
- pancreatic cancer.
For instance, researchers think that around 70 in every 100 women (around 70%) with a faulty BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene will develop breast cancer in the end.[2]
What makes matters even worse, is that people with faulty BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes also have an increased risk to develop aggressive cancers.
RUNNING IN THE FAMILY
So the thing is that you can essentially inherit cancer through faulty BRCA genes, and often these genes run in families.
You might be healthy as fuck, but still get cancer.
I know of cases in which a grandmother, her daughters and their daughters all developed breast cancer, and eventually died from it. Another particular, more personal case is that of my ex-wife.
She had an aunt who died at a young age from an aggressive form of breast cancer, and my ex-wife caught it herself.
I think that before the cancer, she was healthy.
She had some allergies, but beside that, she was a competitive martial artist, always on weight, didn’t smoke and drank moderately, and was very fit. But sometimes, when the cancer is already growing in you for a while with no symptoms whatsoever, you might feel healthy, but actually you aren’t.
In case of my ex-wife, when the first symptom came — a small lump in an armpit — she already had stage IV breast cancer spread to the bones.
The last time I saw her (by coincidence), she looked extremely bad, and it was clear that she was suffering from liver metastasis (her skin was yellow).
I have never seen a person look so empty.
Not much later, she would hear that she had one more month to live at the most, and a couple of weeks later she was gone.
How do perfectly healthy people get cancer ?
Unfortunately, sometimes the secret lies within.
SOURCES: for the image, I consulted this source: Life Without Breast. A New Tribe of Scarred Breast Cancer Heroes.
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