Cancer has a way of dividing your life into before and after. I learned that when a routine procedure led doctors to discover something far more serious. What was supposed to be a straightforward surgery revealed a suspicious lump. A biopsy confirmed the unthinkable: stage 4 cancer.
By the time it was found, the disease had already spread. My only option was to fight with everything available, including a bone marrow transplant. After years of recovery, I was blessed with remission, but the cancer returned, and I found myself fighting it on yet another experimental drug. The medication helped, but it was not enough to get me into remission, and I needed yet another treatment. It was a newly approved CAR-T Therapy Transplant, which was performed at the fifth anniversary of my original diagnosis.
Today, I am profoundly grateful to say I just celebrated one year of remission post-transplant. I know how lucky I am to be here. Very few people survive the kind of stage four diagnosis like mine. I often wonder how different my journey might have been if my cancer had been caught earlier, before it had the chance to spread.
That question matters far beyond my own story.
In 2026, roughly half a million Americans will be diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, about one in four new cancer cases. At that point, survival rates plummet: only about 26 percent of patients diagnosed at stage 4 will live five years, compared with 64 percent of those diagnosed at stage 3. Nearly half of all cancer deaths are linked to cancers detected in stage 4, after the disease has already spread.
For aggressive cancers such as pancreatic, lung, stomach, and esophageal cancer, the numbers are even more devastating. Fewer than 5 percent of patients diagnosed at stage 4 survive five years, and more than 40 percent of those cancers are already advanced when they’re discovered.
Finding cancer before it spreads changes everything. When cancer is detected early, doctors have more tools, such as surgery, radiation, targeted therapies, and a better chance of eliminating the disease. Early detection doesn’t guarantee an easy path, but it dramatically improves the odds and opens doors that are often closed once cancer reaches stage 4.
That is why Congress’s recent passage of the Nancy Gardner Sewell Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act is so significant. The new law creates a pathway for Medicare to cover multi-cancer early detection (MCED) tests once they receive approval from the FDA. These innovative blood tests are designed to detect signals from dozens of types of cancer, including many that currently have no routine screening options at all.
No law can promise miracles. It does not replace mammograms, colonoscopies, or other established screenings. But it does something profoundly important: it clears the way for access. It ensures that when these tests are approved, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to access them. It sends a clear message that catching cancer earlier, before it reaches stage 4, is a national priority.
For future patients, that could mean the difference between manageable treatment and the most aggressive interventions medicine has to offer. It could mean more options, better odds, and more time for family dinners, graduations, weddings, and ordinary days that suddenly feel extraordinary.
I cannot rewrite my own diagnosis. But because Congress acted to expand access to early detection, more Americans may never have to hear “stage 4” as their first introduction to cancer. That is a future filled with hope and one that is absolutely worth fighting for.
Phil Jeansonne, Louisiana Resident and Cancer Patient
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