Three Months
Ada Nestor | My Reflections from the Edge
Three months ago today, we lost our father.
It still feels impossible to write those words.
His cancer came suddenly. One month from diagnosis to hospice. One month from hope and treatment plans to morphine and whispered goodbyes. He was surrounded by his immediate family, held in love until his last breath. But the speed of it all remains staggering.
My father was being followed regularly by a pulmonologist. He was not a man who ignored his health. There were no warnings of something growing silently. No years of symptoms brushed off or dismissed. And then, all at once, there it was. Aggressive, consuming, unstoppable.
I have a natural tendency to try to make sense of what does not make sense. When the timing defies what we know about how cancer develops, I search for answers. When the loss feels senseless, I look for reasons.
In these last few weeks, studies have begun to emerge that make those questions harder to ignore.
A large population-based cohort study out of South Korea followed more than eight million people and found statistically significant increases in several cancers within one year of COVID-19 vaccination. Thyroid, gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate cancers all showed elevated hazard ratios. Read the study here.
Another study from Italy looked at nearly 300,000 residents. They found that vaccinated individuals, especially those with no prior COVID infection, were more likely to be hospitalized for cancer. The hazard ratio was 1.23 — modest, but real. And when they changed the analytic window to exclude the first year, the association disappeared. PubMed 40881928.
What do we take from that? The scientists themselves are cautious. They say these are associations, not proof of causation. They warn about confounding variables, detection bias, and limitations. They call the findings preliminary.
But here is the truth from where I stand: if you live through what my family did, you cannot help but see these signals in a different light. My father’s sudden and aggressive cancer came just three months after his fifth Moderna CV shot. We will never have certainty about causation. But the overlap between lived experience and early data makes the questions unavoidable.
I begged him not to get the shots. To wait for more information. I said it enough times that one Sunday after coffee with Dad, my husband sat me down and asked me a hard question: “Do you want to be right, or do you want a relationship with your father?” And he was right. I let it go. I hardly ever mentioned it again. I chose the relationship.
Now, three months after his death, I carry both grief and the weight of unanswered questions.
This is why the studies matter. This is why transparency and honest inquiry matter. Because for families like mine, this is not theory. It is not politics. It is not something to be dismissed as fringe. It is lived reality, and it deserves clarity.
We are long past the point where “safe and effective” slogans are enough. We need data. We need truth. We need accountability.
Three months. It feels like yesterday. It feels like forever.
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