The Standard Dose Almost Killed Her
What Annabelle Gurwitch wants every patient to know
A few months into her Stage 4 lung cancer treatment, Annabelle Gurwitch’s son came home from college and found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.
She’d been on the recommended dose of her targeted therapy. She’d known for weeks it was unlivable. She hadn’t told her doctor. She thought tolerating it was what a good patient did.
I knew Annabelle’s book before I knew her story. The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker is the funniest, most honest, and most useful thing I have read about living with an incurable diagnosis. Annabelle has been kicking lung cancer’s ass at Stage 4 for five years, on a targeted therapy she was told would stop working in eighteen months. She is alive because she stopped doing what she’d been told a good patient does. She calls herself a cancer slacker, not a cancer warrior. The phrase is funnier than it is, and more serious than it sounds.
What I did not expect, walking into the conversation, was how much of her experience I recognized in mine. I had Stage 2A breast cancer, called my treatment my cancer obliteration project, built a spreadsheet by the second round of chemo to stay ahead of side effects, and still found myself filtering in person. Two different stages. Two different prognoses. Same self-silencing.
In the deep-dive for paid subscribers: what the FDA is finally doing about a fifty-year-old assumption in cancer drug dosing, why the rules that determine who gets lung cancer screened are medical sex discrimination, why lung cancer research is funded at a fraction of its mortality burden, and my spreadsheet to estimate the financial impact of a cancer diagnosis. It’s free at joellekaufman.com.
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