2025-05-30
26 分钟This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shamita Basu.
Today, why a 25-cent pill is being sold to cancer patients for hundreds of dollars.
In early 2023,
journalist David Armstrong started feeling pains in his abdomen.
At first, he dismissed them as muscle cramps,
and he tried to ignore them for a few weeks, but they kept getting worse.
And then one February morning, things took a turn.
I woke up and I literally couldn't get out of bed.
They were just excruciating.
I had to grip the wall to stand up.
So David went to the ER and scans showed holes and weakened spots in David's bone,
areas where tissue had been destroyed.
Pretty much from there, they knew that I had multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer.
There were some more tests to confirm it.
But that's the day I found out that I had this particular cancer.
David was shaken.
Multiple myeloma is a rare, incurable blood cancer.
Decades ago, the prognosis was grim.
The life expectancy of a newly diagnosed patient was three to five years.