Four years ago, Ontarian Rebecca Grundy got a nightmare diagnosis that sent her into a blind panic.
She was only 28 years old and had no reason to believe she was anything other than perfectly healthy, except for a few headaches.
But after waking up on a stretcher in the hallway of a Toronto hospital after suffering three grand mal seizures, doctors found a cancerous tumour the size of her fist on the front left lobe of her brain.
“As soon as I was told, everything closed in around me… I felt like the floor was falling beneath me and the world was just spinning around. And I literally couldn’t see out of the tears that were coming down my face,” she said.
“In that moment, my life was changed forever.”
Her diagnosis: grade four glioblastoma, an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer with one of the lowest survival rates — typically less than 18 months.
And it’s not usually seen in adults under the age of 45.
When it comes to treating cancer in Canada, it turns out that age does matter.
The drug Grundy needed to survive, an at-home chemotherapy treatment called Temozolomide, is not covered provincially for patients of her age.
