Terry Fox and cancer

Factual Questions
1

It’s Terry Fox day in Canada. He died from osteocarcinoma in 1981.
The thing I thought funny was that his symptoms appeared as a result of a minor traffic accident. A sore knee never healed and after a period of time the tumour was found.
Is this common? Did the accident trigger some sort of gene expression?

2

Since none of the medical types have entered an opinion on this, I’ll give you a free bump and my own non-medical-background opinion.

My guess is that the tumor was already present when he had the accident, and the bumping of his knee, where it presumably started, aggravated an already present condition, so his knee still stayed sore.

Is this sort of thing common? It’s not an usual occurrence for some kind of pain somewhere to be caused by a tumor, cancerous or not. But I’d guess that most of the time, it’s not a tumor.

Did the accident trigger “gene expression?” Have no idea. I’ve noticed that the (IMO) idiotic line in the wiki article saying that the accident might have caused the cancer has been deleted and readded in the past several months. It should be removed, but it looks as though someone would just put it back.

3

Purely anecdotal, but a guy I went to junior high with injured his leg slightly (I think it was a motorcycle accident), and then during the non-healing it was determined that he had bone cancer and they amputated his leg at age 18 or so.

We were never sure if that accident lost him his leg or saved his life.

4

There are a number of possible factors at work here:

  1. We never hear about all the persistently sore knees (or breasts or testes or whatever) that don’t develop cancers.

  2. When a part of the body is injured, it’s more likely to be examined by a doctor and/or investigated with things such an x-ray. In either case, cancers which were still in their silent phase might thereby be detected.

  3. The presence of a cancer might render the surrounding/supporting tissue less “rugged” and, therefore, more likely to be significantly injured by relatively minor trauma - trauma that would ordinarily have no ill effect. The classic example of this is someone with a cancer that’s invaded (silently) one of the major leg bones (e.g. femur) and then breaking their leg simply as a result of walking. Walking by itself!

5

My neighbor, and friend, probably died of this. He was an auto mech. and he fell at work one day. He was too sore to get around the next day so he stayed home. When it persisted he contacted worker’s comp. and went to a Dr. He chose a chiropractor, which turned out to be a fatal mistake, IMHO. It was a couple of months before he finally got an Xray. If he’d gotten the Xray sooner they’d probably have discovered the cancer and might have been able to treat it, but we’ll never know. He was dead within about 4 months, that was in '96.