Suzanne Bakker has PMP, a rare form of peritoneal cancer. She’s finished. “That means, roughly speaking, you go home to die,” she says.
By telling her story, she hopes that more attention will be paid to rare forms of cancer. “Even if you will only be diagnosed earlier, it could save lives. That’s a profit,” says Suzanne.
One in three people who have a rare cancer is initially misdiagnosed. The delays in making a correct diagnosis may explain why the chance that people with a rare form of cancer survive the disease is 15 percent lower than the chance of people who have a cancer that occurs more often, says the Comprehensive Cancer Center Netherlands.
No numbers
Suzanne would have loved to have figures or statistics about her cancer type PMP. “If you have a survival rate of about 90 percent when you start treatment, or of 30 percent, that makes a difference. Then you start weighing. To do that well, you need those numbers, and experiences, but there are actually none. ”
Suzanne herself has not had chemo because it would probably cost more than yield. “And that ‘probably’ is the tricky thing. So I can’t say that I try everything at all costs. It’s so difficult, because there aren’t many people with this type of cancer.”
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