A 35-year-old father named Gert Van Melkebeke died two days after learning of his incurable heart cancer. A story that raises the question of the diagnosis of this rare pathology.
On Sunday May 16, 2021, a young father from Halaltert (East Flanders) passed away following a rare and incurable cancer of the heart. He leaves behind a companion, the son of this one and their baby born at the end of April of this year, relates HLN. What is most tragic in this story is that he learned of his illness two days before his death from cardiac arrest. “We heard the news with great sadness. The sudden farewell was difficult.”, said the carnival group to which Gert was a part. The void you leave is enormous. The grief is immense, but the memory of you as a person is just as great. You were always ready to lend a hand or lend a listening ear. Gert was always there for everyone. Our hearts go out to his fiancée, his family and his friends as well. ”
A rare cancer
Placed in an artificial coma since May 2021, Gert had just woken up a week before the tragedy and had been diagnosed: heart cancer, which had crept into the liver. “Due to the shape and location of the tumor, there was nothing they could do for Gert”, said his fiancée, Sabrina. For the oncologist who followed the patient, this is a case “extremely rare” among others around the world. “Since January he has had one exam after another, because he was hospitalized three times, inexplicably, for inflammation of the pericardium. His life has been hung on a thread several times before, which is normally quite a trivial matter. On scans and the like, nothing was detected. At the time, they examined it from every angle and found nothingGert’s companion added to the Dutch-speaking Belgian daily. On Friday, they gave us hope that we still had some time. Specialists were assessing whether they could still give chemo, to extend his life by six months at best, but he died two days later. During a scan of his lungs, he had to undergo anesthesia and died of cardiac arrest. “
Before he died, Gert’s only concern was with his loved ones. “He only knew for two days that it was incurable. The first thing he said to me after the doctors informed him was ‘sorry’. Du Gert spat all over it. He cared no more about it. us than of himself “, concludes Sabrina.
According to World Health Organization, heart cancer is very little known and diagnosed. A study published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, dating from 2016, showed that the so-called primary heart tumors (developing directly in the heart) would affect 1.38 people in 100,000 each year. As recalled maxisciences, heart cancer is often the result of genetic defects. When heart tumors are malignant, they are treated with chemotherapy, surgery, or even both.