Amy Wareham chalked her occasional headaches up to the normal stresses of everyday life—until she was told he she a rapidly growing brain tumor that puts most patients in the grave in less than two years from diagnosis.
Wareham, 47, is a lawyer in the UK who had no idea anything was wrong with her until a business trip took her to New York City in 2023. While abroad, she had a seizure and fell over onto the street directly onto her face.
She was expecting to get examined at the hospital to figure out what caused the seizure, but Wareham was not prepared for the answer: glioblastoma multiforme. The disease is an “aggressive” and rapidly growing cancer with a grim prognosis. Only 17 percent of people who receive the diagnosis are still alive two years after getting the news. While it does not usually metastasize, glioblastoma resists pretty much every conventional cancer treatment.
Wareham discovered she had not one, but two tumors in her brain. While the numbers for patients like Wareham don’t look good, she’s taken every therapy available to give her a chance at life. The first step was surgery to remove as much of the tumor manually as possible. Then came the radiation and chemotherapy, a brutal regimen, but one preferable to death. The follow up treatment aims to zap any cancer cells that escaped the surgeon’s scalpel, which is common.
She says she’s feeling “relatively very well,” and said she’s made substantial progress since her diagnosis in May 2023. The first year was a “whirlwind” of medical appointments, scans, blood tests—dealing with potentially deadly medical diagnosis can quickly become a person’s full-time job.
When she learned the hard news, Wareham got married to her husband, Bruce. She is thinking about others who are suffering with her condition, and asks people moved by her story to direct any gifts to her instead to the British Brain Tumour Charity. So far, Wareham and her husband have personally raised nearly $115,000 for research into aggressive brain tumors.
