*blinks*

[conuly]

Mostly, I agree with this article. Good stuff. But...

"I got married really young because I really wanted a family," Fisher said, "and I also knew I was going to die young."

Fisher married at 21, had a baby at 22 and was battling breast cancer by 31. She's been in remission for 12 years, but is fighting a new battle.


You have an inheritable problem that predisposes you to cancer. You arranged your life around this. There is no benefit from this, and the odds are that you'll die young. So you got married early to have kids?

Genetic testing revealed that her daughter, Kate, has the BRCA-1 gene, which is associated with colon and breast cancers.

I don't want to say anything I don't mean, so listen carefully. I don't think this woman or her daughter would've been better off, or the daughter (or woman) hadn't been born. I think people need a lot of education about various disabilities before saying "oh, this kid might have *blank*, I should get an abortion". But in this case, she knows the problems involved in this, they're not pretty... *shrugs* I would've adopted, that's all.

Comments

[latenightparty.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the odds are of her and her daughter getting cancer, though? Who knows, the daughter might've been born without the gene. And even if you do have it, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll actually get cancer.

But yeah, it sort of bugs me that this lady centered her entire life around the fact that she was sure she'd get cancer. She did... but there's a chance she might not have!

[conuly]

Not a great chance, though. That's roughly akin to saying "I'm centering my life around the odds that I'll die, but there's a chance I won't". Okay, I have greater odds of dying than she had of getting cancer, but her odds of getting cancer weren't as low as you're making out.

[latenightparty.livejournal.com]

So were they over 50-50, I wonder?

[conuly]

You want a 50% chance before you'll take precautions against an early death?

The risk of getting ovarian cancer if a woman has a marker for a mutation is 40 percent, Weber said, compared to 1 percent if they are removed. Once a woman gets the cancer, there is an 80 percent to 85 percent chance of dying, she said.

She had, apparently, a 40% chance of getting ovarian cancer. This is in addition to the increased likelihood of other types of cancer.