Dying of other cancer...

[Jackie07]

Another cancer incident of my college basketball team...

The Captain a year behind me e-mailed us pictures of Houtzu's funeral. Included was a picture of her and another teammate who had also attended the farewell service. This teammate, a college instructor in the midst of working on her advancement dissertation, is also a breast cancer survivor (surgery in 2006). Her mother passed away two years ago from stomach cancer.

So far, out of the 12 members of the 1982 team, we've had 4 cancer incidents - all gynecological cancers. All three members with breast cancer (one also had ovarian cancer, and I've had life-long brain tumors) are alive and well (8 1/2 years with recurrence - me, 4 1/2 years, 5 1/2 years respectively.) All four of us have family members/relatives who have been diagnosed with cancer (lung, NHL, Colon, and Stomach) - makes me wonder about the HNPCC connection: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lyn...H0001895/drome

This is pretty close to the statistics of cancer incident in Taiwan http://www.asiatoday.com/pressreleas...er-rise-taiwan except that we've all just passed the half century mark (instead of the cut-off age - 74 - used in the statistics) None of us has the risk factor of alcohol use, betel nut consumption [major cause of oral cancer in Taiwan] or obesity. Hopefully we've matched the statistic and no more teammates will be diagnosed with cancer in the future.