Cancer survivor faces new health crisis: journalist's journey through precancerous diagnosis

Amy Wu was fifty years old when her body began sending signals she couldn't ignore. The rhythms that had always anchored her sense of wellness—sleep, appetite, digestion, menstruation—had shifted, just slightly, but enough to register on the internal gauge she had learned to trust. She had built her life around consistency, around the discipline of healthy living. Now something was off.

That vigilance, that almost obsessive attention to her body's signals, had been forged more than a decade earlier in Hong Kong. Wu had worked there as a journalist from 2009 to 2013, and in 2013, at thirty-seven with no family history of cancer, she received a diagnosis of stage 0 breast cancer—the earliest form detectable by modern screening. She kept her breasts. She had clean annual screenings ever since. But the experience left something behind: a permanent alertness, a kind of inner radar that never quite powered down. When she moved back to the United States, settling in Connecticut north of New York, that familiar dread returned as her body began to change.

In January, after months of noticing her symptoms, Wu received a diagnosis of precancerous uterine changes. The numbers her doctors presented were stark. There was a forty percent chance that cancer already existed inside her. There was a more than fifty percent chance that if she did nothing, the precancerous cells would advance to full uterine cancer within a few years. The decision, though framed as a choice, felt inevitable. She underwent a total hysterectomy. When the pathology report came back, it carried news she had not quite dared to expect: no cancer was found. The precancerous tissue had been removed before it could transform.

Wu's experience, while personal, points to something much larger. Endometrial cancer—cancer that begins in the inner lining of the uterus—is the most common reproductive cancer among women in Hong Kong, according to Dr. Karen Chan Kar-loen, chair and professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Hong Kong. The disease typically announces itself through bleeding after menopause, which means many cases are caught early. When caught early, surgery often works. The prognosis is good. For advanced cases, immunotherapy has recently become available, expanding the options beyond traditional chemotherapy.

But early detection depends on knowing what to watch for and having access to screening. The risk factors are numerous and, for many women, unavoidable: obesity, early menstruation, never having given birth, late menopause. There is also tamoxifen, the medication commonly prescribed to breast cancer patients to prevent recurrence. Women who take tamoxifen face an elevated risk of uterine cancer—a trade-off that doctors and patients must weigh together, knowing that preventing breast cancer recurrence may increase the risk of a different malignancy.

Wu's story unfolds during Gynaecologic Cancer Awareness Month, a time when the medical community works to raise visibility around cancers that often receive less public attention than breast cancer, despite their prevalence. Her willingness to share her experience—not once but twice, a cancer survivor facing a new health crisis—serves as a reminder that vigilance, though born from trauma, can save lives. It also underscores how common these diagnoses are, how many women navigate the same calculations, the same fears, the same difficult choices about their bodies and their futures.