The Future of Medicine (WIRED Guides): How We Will Enjoy Longer, Healthier Lives by James Temperton & Wired

Author:James Temperton & Wired [Temperton, James & Wired]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Management, Entrepreneurship, Social Science, Future Studies, General, Strategic Planning, Technology & Engineering, Health & Fitness, science
ISBN: 9781473585638
Google: CbvmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-03-25T23:53:01.604746+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

A cure for cancer

By the time he was 15 years old Connor McMahon had already beaten cancer twice. Connor, a talented young hockey player who grew up in Cumming, a small city just north of Atlanta, Georgia, had spent 12 years of his life fighting acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. He had endured six years of chemotherapy, been hospitalised eight times, spent eight weeks as a hospital inpatient, attended 136 cancer-centre appointments, had four surgeries, 23 bone-marrow aspirations, 40 spinal taps and had taken thousands of pills. But, by the summer of 2015, Connor was out the other side. He received his last dose of chemotherapy and sailed through subsequent blood tests to check if the cancer had returned. Month after month the blood tests came back perfect. Then, in June 2016, abnormalities were detected. More tests. Then the phone rang.

‘His oncologist called me,’ says Don, Connor’s father. ‘He said, “There’s no good way to tell you this, but the cancer’s back.” I was in denial.’ The prognosis was not good. The only option for Connor was a bone-marrow transplant, which would give him a 30 per cent chance of surviving the next 12 months. ‘When the head of oncology at the best children’s hospital in the south tells you your kid’s going to be dead in twelve months, it kinda hurts,’ says Don. ‘He said, “It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. There’s really nothing we can do.” I was devastated.’

More bad news would follow. Tests confirmed that six years of chemotherapy had left Connor sterile. That night Don was having some drinks at a neighbour’s house when his phone started pinging. He was being bombarded with messages from someone who followed ‘Connor’s Hope’, a Facebook page that he had created to document his son’s journey and shine a light on children going through similarly hard times. When Don woke up the next morning and looked at a video he had been sent the night before, his hangover quickly lifted. The video showed a child just like Connor, months from death, who had been given an experimental treatment to fight her cancer. Like Connor, the girl in the video had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, the most common childhood cancer. And from the brink of death, the girl in the video had, within days, been declared cancer-free. ‘I walked into Connor’s room and I woke him up and we watched the video and he said, “I want that.”’

The girl in the video was Emily Whitehead. Like Connor, Emily was one of the unlucky kids with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Remission rates for the most common form of the disease are 85 per cent. Emily and Connor found themselves on the wrong side of the divide. Like Connor, Emily’s cancer was ferocious. For 16 months it resisted chemotherapy. At its peak, the cancer in her bloodstream was doubling with each passing day. A bone-marrow transplant was no longer possible – the aggressiveness of the chemotherapy that had failed to defeat Emily’s cancer had, in the process, almost defeated Emily.

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