David and I met in high school.
Our relationship blossomed
we were engaged by the time we were 19
and married at 21.
And then we had our three kids
starting with Charlotte when I was 26.
Yeah, we were living the dream.
Everyone who met David liked him
he was just charismatic and
he was intelligent, he was funny,
and he was my best friend.
It was a week before Christmas
and two weeks before I was due to have our third baby
and we were walking into his parents house
and he put his hand under his arm and he said to me,
"Jen, I've got a lump under my arm."
On the 28th of December,
after they'd done all the biopsies,
they told us it was melanoma.
A family friend told us we needed to come and see
Georgina Long at Melanoma Institute
and they removed the tumour from under his arm,
but unfortunately about six weeks later
while we were doing radiotherapy
another small lump came up
and they found another spot on his hip
and that put David as Stage 4.
David's disease progressed at
an amazing rate and what it did to his body was
beyond comprehension unless you've actually witnessed it.
He went from a young
33-year-old man who was strong and fit,
to not being able to get out of bed,
to not being able to walk.
He was very worried about
our kids, our little girls, and even
when I finally told him that the journey was over
he just closed his eyes and said, "My poor, poor babies."
When we started treatment I decided to start a blog
documenting what we were going through
and now when I go back and I look at it,
it's a nice treasure of
David's final few months and how hard we fought
and something for our kids to look at one day
and see what their Dad was like.
Throughout the journey David
formed quite a strong relationship with Inês
she was the one who would visit him daily on the ward.
So I met David in one of
our clinics with Professor Georgina Long
so David was one of our patients.
So super progressors are patients who
they don't respond, but they
increase the rate of progression.
We have a subgroup of patients
where the rate of progression is incredibly high
and I believe that those patients are different.
After David died, Inês, Dr. Silva
contacted me to say how touched she was
by meeting David and how inspired she was
because he was such a strong, positive person.
And we did everything and it was not possible to help him.
That's really, really sad. That's really hard.
Definitely when David died I felt like my work was not done.
So my goal is
definitely try to understand some of the mechanisms of resistance.
So try to come up with
new therapeutic strategies to be able to help.
Even if I just help one David Day,
for me it will be enough.
It is so important that
we raise awareness and that
we find a solution to this.
One melanoma patient dies every 5 hours,
which I think is extremely sad and
it explains why we need to find those answers.
I'm not sure we have time to wait.
That's exactly what drives me every day to the lab
and try to get those answers as quick as possible.
We need that answer for everyone.
So that everyone can watch their kids grow up
so that they don't lose that opportunity
so that little kids aren't growing up without their Dad or their Mum.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét