His three children died of cancer and now he faces the disease: “Impossible so much pain”

A Brazilian man had to face the worst drama of his life: his three children died of cancer within four years, due to a strange hereditary syndrome. “Impossible so much pain,” he assumes.

The economist Regis Feitosa Mota, 52, from Fortaleza (CE), lost his children Beatriz, Pedro and Ana Carolina due to the same illness as their father.

The Brazilian told BBC News Brazil that all the drama started in 2009 when doctors discovered his eldest daughter, Anna Carolina, had acute lymphocytic leukemia at age 12.

As expected, the little girl started radiotherapy and chemotherapy for three years and apparently managed to recover her health during that time.

Years later, his father had breast cancer at the same time as his wife. Later, he discovered several small lumps on her neck, armpit, and abdomen. After many tests he discovered that he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. A disease that he continues to treat today.

In 2016, Mota’s second son Pedro discovered osteosarcoma in his left leg. Over the next few years, the disease spread to other parts of the body, such as the lungs and spine.

The youngest daughter, Beatriz, born of another marriage, discovered at the age of nine that she had the same disease as her sister. A year later, the girl could not stand it and she died.

Pedro also had complications with the disease and passed away in 2020.

This week, Regis buried his eldest daughter, Anna Carolina, who came to recover from an illness, holds a medical degree, but he fell ill again with a brain tumor and could not resist. He died on November 19th.

Through social media, the man greeted his daughter and thanked the affection of all those who accompany him and his fight against the disease.

hereditary drama

“In four and a half years I lost all my children. The second diagnosis (in the family) was in 2016, when they discovered chronic lymphocytic leukemia, after presenting symptoms such as fever, swelling in the neck and weakness,” Régis said.

The family didn’t understand what was happening to their health with all those cancer diagnoses, so they decided to get doctors to help investigate.

In this way, tests made it possible to demonstrate in 2016 that this family suffered from a strange genetic syndrome that increases the risk of developing cancer and little can be done to stop the disease.

“The results showed that I had a genetic alteration which unfortunately was also passed on to my children and which increases the appearance of cancer,” Régis explained.

This disease is known as Li-Fraumeni syndrome is caused by multiple mutations in the TP53 gene, according to the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) “Tumors often appear at a young age, and a person may have more than one type of cancer. Li-Fraumeni is a type of hereditary cancer syndrome. It’s also called SLF,” reports the NCI.

Precisely, after little Anna’s first diagnosis, the disease was discovered in Beatriz (9 years old) and for this reason she had to undergo a bone marrow transplant in 2017, but the little girl died a year later.

For his part, Jorge was also diagnosed with bone cancer at the age of 17 and despite recovering from the disease four times, he developed brain cancer in 2019 and died at the end of 2020.

“At that moment, we started to believe that these three cases could not be a coincidence. At that time, we decided it would be better to investigate,” acknowledged Régis.

Despite the pain, this man does not understand how he developed this genetic alteration because no other family member has this disease as his parents, aged 81 and 78, are completely healthy.

“With them I learned that time is too precious and that we are too. That we must love and live intensely until our last day arrives. What will differentiate one from the other is the journey and the love we experience in the interval between the day of arrival and the day of departure,” Régis wrote on his social media.