Irrfan Kahn, the Bollywood and Hollywood star who played key roles in “Life of Pi”, “Jurassic Park”, and Academy Award Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire”, is finally set to head back to work after a year of cancer treatment in London.
“Maybe somewhere in the pursuit of winning we forget how much it means to be loved. In our vulnerability, we are reminded,” he wrote on Twitter. “As I leave my footprints onto these steps of my life, I want to pause to be grateful for receiving your immense love and support. It soothed me in my process of healing. So I travel back to you, thanking you from the bottom of my heart.”
Read MoreIrrfan (@irrfank) April 3, 2019Khan, 52, was diagnosed with high-grade neuroendocrine cancer in March, 2018.
Neuroendocrine cancer is a rare type of cancer that can begin anywhere in the body, but most often occurs in the lungs, appendix, small intestine, rectum, or pancreas. With this cancer, tumors form from cells that release hormones into the blood. These hormones are released according to signals from the nervous system.
At the time of his diagnosis, Khan noted that doctors don’t know as much about neuroendocrine cancer as they do other cancers. “Due to fewer case studies” for his particular type of cancer, “[the] unpredictability of the treatment was more. I was part of a trial-and-error game,” Khan wrote. “I trust, I’ve surrendered irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of where this takes me, eight months from now, or four months from now, or two years.”
SurvivorNet has spoken with a neuroendocrine cancer survivor in the past. “I’ve always had endocrine issues, and one of the things that happened to me five years prior to diagnosis is I had some, what they call GI bleeding, and I went to the hospital, and even since that first bleed, I had not felt well. I kept pursuing doctor after doctor,” says Judy Golz, a sixty-one year old neuroendocrine cancer survivor.
“I had a lot of multiple symptoms. One of the symptoms that I was having was a weight gain. I gained almost 25 pounds in period of five years for no reason,” she continues. “I wasn’t eating any differently. I thought there was something hormonally going on. I had infertility. I had a lot of issues with flushing, where I would just turn red for no reason, and I just generally did not feel well.”
“When I was diagnosed, I was told I had carcinoid cancer, and the way this cancer is, you can have a very tiny tumor that is like a mothership, and it just wreaks havoc on the body,” says Golz. “My tumor, even though it was only one centimeter, they determined that I had had it for over 10 years, and that was what was giving me all those symptoms. It did metastasize to the lymph nodes, and the metastasis with this cancer is often much larger than the primary.”
Judy says that at the time she was diagnosed, she didn't have the necessary resources to really identify her symptoms and articulate them properly during her doctor visits. But today there's a lot more out there. "If I had these symptoms today, because of all the information out there, I think I would have been able to diagnose myself."
Khan, who also appeared in “The Amazing Spider-Man”, has several Bollywood films in production.
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