My wife’s aunt had a really bad case of breast cancer. After a double mastectomy she didn’t have any recurrences for quite a long time (maybe 20 years, not sure), but then she ultimately died of complications from esophegeal cancer. She was a doctor and felt certain that there was a link.
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I think some people are just more prone to cancer than others and if you had it once you are potentially more likely to get it again than the general population. I’m not sure if it is the same cancer that she had 20 years prior though to claim she wasn’t cured.
In the case of my mother, I would hope that her chances aren’t higher than the general population though since her cancer was linked to hormones that she no longer has.
When cancers “recur” after more than 5 years, they can be the same cancer, or they can be a new cancer. My guess is that most of the time, no one knows for certain which it is.
John Travolta was only 5 years younger.
And Stockard Channing was 5 years older
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Yeah, she in no way looked like a high school student. Neither did Travolta or really any of the guys, nor the gal who played Frenchie, or probably any of the other gals besides Olivia Newton-John.
Even though Newton-John is older than Travolta, she was the most believable as a high school student of any of the actors IMO. She had a more youthful look.
She did look young until Frenchie’s makeover
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True. The first time I saw the movie I didn’t even realize it was her and was confused as to who the new character was and what happened to Sandy!
This. As genetic testing gets better we can differentiate more types of cancer, so it is possible to rule out it being the same cancer in some/many/most (not sure) cases.
The c word isn’t generally used in oncology because it’s so hard to really know.
Yes there were many things in that movie I was curious about, such as the name of the person who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp and whether or not people called it “bah bah” before this action even took place.
Yeah, I considered saying that there are some cases where a genetic analysis can say yeah or nay, but, I think there are still a lot of cases where either that genetic analysis isn’t cost-effective or it doesn’t answer the question. But then I thought that was more than really needed. Or maybe I was just too lazy to spell it out. 
I guess we have a different thread for non-well-known RIPs, but a woman I knew slightly and greatly respected just died of pancreatic cancer at age 57. She was a science writer, and she co-wrote her final paper with an oncologist, for a medical journal, an autobiographical paper titled “a case of pancreatic cancer mistaken for type 2 diabetes”. Yeah, fuck cancer.
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Anne Heche dead. Drugs are bad.
That’s too bad. But not unexpected based on the accident. RIP.
RIP Paul Coker. Cartoonist for 50+ years for Mad Magazine. Loved his “Horrifying Cliches” cartoons back in the day.
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So did she die Friday or Sunday?
I think she was declared brain dead, and then her body was taken off life support several days later.
So in a sense there are two different days in which she “died.” I think legal death was when she was declared brain dead. But NYT for example seems to have waited on the obit until she was off life support, which was maybe yesterday.
idk, i saw that she was dead when i posted that on friday. 
She was declared “brain dead” on Friday, but was maintained on life-support systems to allow more time to see if there were compatible donor(s) for her organs.
Once they were found, she was taken off life support.