A 40% chance of developing ovarian cancer if BRCA1 positive still does not translate to a high probability of being BRCA1 if one has ovarian cancer.
According to the CDC it’s about a 10% chance of having BRCA 1 or 2 given having ovarian cancer. 90% chance not. I do see another site going as high a 20% but still the probability is not.
Doesn’t seem so to me. Unless I was specifying what kind, I’d just say he/she/I have cancer, indicating the sufferer has that disease. Saying “have a cancer” suggests it’s some specific location, and I’d expect “have breast/lung/etc. cancer”.
It’s not whether you include “a”. It’s that cancer is hundreds of different diseases, each with a very different prognosis. “I have thyroid cancer” is just a completely different story from “i have pancreatic cancer”, just like “i broke a bone in my little finger” is very different from “i broke my hip”.
I think that kind of depends - if it was a close friend or relative , I would hear/say a specific cancer. Either “I have breast cancer” or mentioning that I had a nodule in my thyroid and it was malignant . Co-worker/neighbor - just “I have cancer” . Because they don’t really need to know anymore than that while my sister/cousin/daughter might.
Well, sure, puzzlegal, but my feeling is the announcement “have cancer” so phrasd is in fact meant to provide the general fact of illness without specifying just where in the body it is. What specific kind of cancer is nobody’s business but the family’s.
Well… yes… but for that long an absence my employer wants something from a doctor and it’s sort of inevitable that’s going to give some information… but for Kate, yes, that’s probably all she actually “owes” the general public.
While all of that is possible I just remind every we don’t know what sort of abdominal surgery she had. “Hysterectomy” is complete speculation, as would be “appendicitis”, “gall bladder removal”, or any number of plentiful possibilities.
Again - complete speculation. We have no way to know if Kate’s “abdominal surgery” involved the lady parts or not, or even so whether the cancer was in them or discovered on a neighboring organ or… well, we just don’t know.
People seem to automatically assume cancer in a women is either breast, uterine, or ovarian but women have other parts that can also become cancerous.
I’d argue that since she’s produced the heir and the spare and a spare spare then no, it’s not the business of anyone else any longer.
It’s now known that a molar pregnancy results from a polar body (extra cells formed in the process that produces an egg) being fertilized. Interestingly, a potentially warning sign is, of all things, hyperemesis, because it also produces massively high hormone levels.
I first heard of this when my old neighbor had one that was indeed malignant, and seemed to defy treatment. When I got Internet access a decade later, I did find out that she was still alive, so they must have found something that finally worked.
Thanks, that’s much lower than I thought. Apparently that’s because a BRCA mutation in general is fairly rare; only about 1 in 400 people have it from what I’m seeing. So most ovarian cancer cases are in non-BRCA-positive women, even though the occurence rate in such women is only about 1%.
The prognosis is usually poor because in its early stages ovarian cancer mostly has no symptoms, so it’s usually not caught until it’s in a late stage, at which point it’s too late for treatment to be effective. But in Kate’s case, if it was detected during unrelated surgery and not due to symptoms, it could be that it was caught at an early stage. In that case the prognosis would be better.
And, further, she’s 42 years old. While conceiving at age 42 (assuming good overall health) is certainly possible, the odds of becoming pregnant rapidly decline by age 40 and older.
I was somewhat baffled by her use of the phrase “preventative chemotherapy”. That can be a thing for certain precancerous conditions, but if you already have cancer, that ship has sailed.
I found an article that suggested she may have been referring to adjuvant chemotherapy, which is done in conjunction with cancer surgery — either before to smooth out the tumor and clean up the edges, or afterwards to eradicate any cancer cells that may have spread throughout the body.
If that is indeed what she meant, that suggests that something was removed during her major abdominal surgery - and I think the most likely narrative is that she had a hysterectomy, afterwards they found either cervical or uterine cancer, and she is now undergoing “preventative” chemotherapy in case any of the cancer cells spread outside the uterus.
I guess they also could have found a tumor during abdominal surgery for another procedure and removed it, but that doesn’t really fit with “we were really surprised when the post-surgical tests showed cancer”.
This theory points to an abdominal organ being removed, and cancers of the appendix and gall bladder are rare….and I can’t think of other abdominal organs that are routinely surgically removed.
On the other hand, she could’ve used the word “preventative” as a filler word in an attempt to soften her diagnosis, and it may have meant nothing more than “chemo prevents the cancer from growing, so it’s preventative”.
In any case, I wish her well, but she didn’t do herself any favors by keeping her diagnosis vague….shes just inviting the kind of speculation we’ve been engaging in.
I think she’s stuck in the middle: if she just said she was ill and would not be making appearances, there’d be gossip about what was really going on and if it was “enough” to justify her leave. There’d be suggestions she had a mental breakdown or plastic surgery or whatever. “Cancer” is universally recognized as a terrible thing that can happen to anyone and that when it does, you just stop everything else and handle it. It’s the single most likely “excuse” to get everyone off her back for a while, and if it’s true (I assume it is), she’d surely really like to use it.
On the other hand, if it’s cervical cancer, that’s an STI. So that’s a whole different type of speculation. Was she cheating on William? Did she get it before she met him? Was he cheating on her? What if he did, and she dies? He literally killed her (though, again, there’s a lot more nuance than that in those sort of circumstances). If it is cervical cancer, she just absolutely could NOT say say so, ever ever ever.
So yeah. I think “Have cancer/need chemo” is the rational choice there.
I fully expect to eventually learn many more details, whether i want to or not. (And I don’t really care very much, being an American.) Once again
Because there’s a whole nation of people who care a great deal about every little detail. And a lot of money involved in that information. And if she didn’t even realize what a dumb idea it was to release an obviously photoshopped image as “proof of life”, she clearly needs guidance.
I find the profound fascination with the most intimate details of celebrities rather unseemly, but …
If Taylor Swift went radio silent for a couple weeks, and then made a very generic announcement about fighting cancer, it would be rather unrealistic to expect a leviathan and devoted/animated fan base that had been carefully cultivated and nurtured over years to just flip off the light switch and patiently await her next update.
Yeah. The human nature part. Ya’ takes the good with the bad, sometimes.
Cancer really doesn’t discriminate, though, does it. Who among us hasn’t had it touch us or somebody we love? Few, I would guess, and maybe too young to be on this message board.
