Deep Thoughts on a Saturday Morning

Before my dad died, he desperately wanted to tell my sister and me that he was passing something on to us through his genes. I had a few conversations with him where he tried to tell me what he meant, but his words were jumbled from the effects of Hhv6, the virus that most of us get when we’re children and is rarely reactivated in adulthood, the virus which led to my dad’s death through complications with the virus. Like most of us, probably, I’d never heard of Hhv6 until the infectious disease doctor told us it had been found in my dad’s bloodwork. I wondered so many times in the hospital if it was hereditary, and I wondered if this is what my dad was worried about passing on to his daughters. I will never know what my dad what trying to tell me because he had no voice from the breathing tube and the tracheostomy. It’s just something that will haunt me. I’ve done a lot of research on HhV6 in the past six months, trying to understand what happened to my dad, if it could have been prevented, and trying to learn more about it to recognize symptoms in my sister or me someday if we have inherited this gene.  

All this to preface that I was on the HhV6 Foundation’s web site yesterday. I entered the words “breast cancer” into the site’s search bar, and one, lone, article popped up: “HHV-6 latency gene U94 has anti-cancer effects in triple-negative breast cancer cells.” My mouth dropped open, and I about fell out of my chair. I read the article, and while I am not a science person, I could understand that U94 does what the headline says it does and potentiates chemotherapy, including taxols, which I have been on and had success with. I then looked up whether U94 can be passed down through the genes, and it can. One of my oncologists told me that my cancer does not act like triple negative cancer and that I am sort of an anomaly. Again, I am no scientist, but maybe, if this article is true, it might explain why I have been doing so well on my cancer journey, why my cancer shrunk and went away and has stayed away for five years now. Maybe I have the gene that my dad may have been worried about passing down. And if that is the case, my dad has actually saved my life. He has given me nine years of life I wasn’t expected to have. And for that, I am eternally grateful.