They Gave Her Eighteen Months. She's at Five Years and Counting.
The success of being a cancer slacker
On our podcast recording, Annabelle Gurwitch’s cat, Shirley, wants attention. Annabelle is happy to give it, stroking the cat through our conversation, the lovely intimacy of a writer at her desk with her familiar. We are talking about cancer. We are also, for a minute, just talking about a cat.
A few minutes later she tells me about the night her son came home from college and found her unconscious in front of the toilet.
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This was not at diagnosis. She had already started treatment. Annabelle had the rare luck of an oncogene-driven cancer with an actionable mutation. Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer with an EGFR (Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor) mutation (specifically, Exon21) in 2020, which meant a targeted therapy existed for her at all. The unlucky part started earlier. Worldwide, more than half of women with lung cancer are never-smokers. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force requires a smoking history to qualify for lung cancer screening, and the agency has acknowledged its current evidence does not support changing that. The math is medical sex discrimination. Most women with lung cancer cannot get screened for the disease they are most likely to develop without smoking, because the screening criteria were built around a male smoking population. Annabelle, like every never-smoker, found her cancer by accident.
She was lucky a drug existed. She was less lucky about the dose.
