The importance of knowing your medical history

I came across a blog post by Jacki Donaldson which emphasises the need to firstly know your family medical history, and secondly, tell your doctor about it.
In particular, this blog post relates to cancer. It made me think of two things.
Firstly, I remembered a recent conversation with a friend who was born with retinoblastoma, the same eye cancer as me. He had two children, neither of whom developed the condition, and they were monitored very closely right from the time they were born. What happened later on was a shock to him. One of his grandchildren was born with the condition. The tumours were picked up when the child was only five months old. It was lucky they were looking out for it, but they didn’t really believe that retinoblastoma could jump a generation. On doing more tests on his children, it was discovered that his son, the father of the RB child, carried the gene. This story shows just how important it is to know your family’s medical history, right back as far as you can go.
The second thing it made me think about was my parents’ reactions when they found out I had RB. They wanted my natural parents to be told, just in case they had other children, for one thing. Well, it didn’t turn up amongst any of my half siblings, but now I know this doesn’t necessarily mean one parent wasn’t a carrier, and that someone else in my family could be. The likelihood is probably very small, but it can’t be ruled out. Adoption always makes these sorts of issues so much more tricky to deal with, and there’s not always an easy answer. And adoptees aren’t the only ones to have these sorts of issues; children born from sperm donation also have this difficulty.
It was easy for the doctors to declare to my parents at the time of my diagnosis that the chances of my natural parents having a child with the same condition were unlikely, because they thought I was the start of the chain. But in reality, this was a poor decision. At the time, though, the technology was not available to do DNA testing to determine if someone was a carrier. So there was no other option at the time.

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