Are we winning the fight against cancer?
By VANESSA MILNE
on her 57th birthday, Claire Edmonds came home late from work to a message on her phone from her doctor. He said to call him back — that night — about the results of a routine mammogram. Having worked for decades as a registered psychotherapist at Wellspring, a Toronto-based support centre for people with cancer, she knew what this moment might bring, and her instincts were right. She had breast cancer.
The disease runs in her family. Both her grandmothers had died of it. Edmonds’ mother had had a prophylactic double mastectomy, a surgery that removes both healthy breasts in the hopes of preventing cancer.
That history made the phone call all the worse. “It felt like the floor gave way,” she says. But Edmonds’ battle with the disease would look quite different than that of the other women in her family: A combination of research, new treatments, universal screening programs and better prevention has dramatically changed the landscape for cancer patients in Canada.
One in two people will get cancer in their lifetime, according to recent figures released in June by the Canadian Cancer Society. That’s a scary statistic, but a large part of the reason for it is that we’re living longer — and the older you are, the more likely you are to get the disease. There have been improvements in survival for all of the “big” cancers, says Heather Bryant, vice-president of cancer control at the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer — in fact, Canadian women are 13 percent less likely to die from any type of cancer now than they were two decades ago.
Overall, Canadian women are 13 percent less likely to die from the disease now than they were two decades ago—but fatality rates for some
types, like lung cancer, remain the same