One Woman's Two-Time Triumph Over Cancer
- A North Carolina woman, Helene Avraham-Katz, has beat pancreatic cancer the disease which took her mom twice.
- Avraham-Katz recently published a new book, The Butterfly Effect, about her journey.
- She treated her disease with chemo, radiation, surgery, and medication; pancreatic cancer can be difficult to detect and symptoms often present later than other cancers.
Helene’s Pancreatic Cancer Journey
Avraham-Katz was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016. Her mother had passed away of the disease earlier, so it ran in her family. After her first diagnosis, Avraham-Katz had chemo, radiation, and 10-hour exploratory surgery to help treat her disease. Related: If You're A First Degree Relative of Someone With Pancreatic Cancer, Screening and Surveillance Could Save Your Life; Here's WhyDoctors told her that she had a 20-25% chance of not waking up from the long surgery. “When he told me that, I was pretty calm,” she tells WXII12. “I said, ‘thank you for letting me know…Those are your statistics, they’re not mine.'” Thankfully, the surgery went well. When Avraham-Katz woke up, she was told by her doctor: “You have diabetes. You do not have a pancreas. You do not have cancer.”
However, in the summer of 2018, her pancreatic cancer came back and spread to her lungs. Her medical team caught the cancer early, because she was being closely monitored. Avraham-Katz is currently in a medical trial where she takes six pills a day instead of chemotherapy.
MD Anderson's Pancreatic Cancer Moon Shot
Pancreatic Cancer Detection
Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive disease which is also difficult to detect because symptoms including jaundice, and weight loss typically present at a later stage in the cancer’s development. Dr. Anirban Maitra, the co-leader of the Pancreatic Cancer Moon Shot at MD Anderson Cancer Center, explains in an earlier interview what he typically sees with this disease.
“Because the pancreas is inside the abdomen,” he says, “it often doesn’t have symptoms that would tell you that something is wrong with your pancreas. By the time individuals walk into the clinic with symptoms like jaundice, weight loss, back pain, or diabetes, it’s often very late in the stage of the disease.”
“Each year in the United States, about 53,000 patients get pancreatic cancer,” says Dr. Maitra. “And unfortunately, most will die from this disease within a few months to a year or so from the diagnosis.”
Detecting Pancreatic Cancer Early Is Crucial
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