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Comment by epoxyhockey | Hacker News Reader

His father, Michael, died in 2002, also from colon cancer.

This is the most sad part of the story. For cancer that is relatively treatable if caught early enough, please see this as a cautionary tale and be extra diligent in getting checked out for diseases that may be hereditary.

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The problem with that logic is that nobody knows the speed with which cancer multiplies.

Even if you got checks down to three months (which no insurance would cover), it would still be like finding a fetus growing inside your colon but too bad it already pierced into other organs because there is no room for fetuses to grow there

The fetus analogy practical because many women don't figure out that are pregnant in the first trimester.

I'd never thought of cancer like that before. You're pregnant with a fetus which is constantly reproducing, trying to make a fetus army in your organs.

The process of pregancy is, in many respects rather like a parasitic infection. The foetus is very good at dampening the mother's defences to it.

That's the problem with many cancers though: there are no symptoms until it's very late. And biomarkers fail to show clear signs for detection in most cases as well. He was 39, even if you have cancer in your family history, it's still relatively unlikely you would get it THAT young. Apart from certain types of cancer, the biggest factor for developing cancer is Age.

This is most likely a form of hereditary colon cancer e.g. Lynch syndrome. It is caused by a germline (inherited) mutation in one of the genes that repair random mutations associated with replication (e.g. the MLH1). Because colon cells divide very fast colon cancer is typically the first one to form.

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