Firths wonder how three of their five children end up diagnosed with cancer

Despite being hundreds of miles away from each other, three siblings have a rare and tragic bond. They all have cancer.

This made the family wonder if there could be more to this than sheer coincidence.

For Oak Island resident, Andrea Firth, it seemed like her grown children’s life threatening cancer came out of no where. “They were all champion soccer players; they were never ill or ever had a broken bone even!”

She explained her daughter Molly passed away while John and Mary are fighting very hard.

As Andrea Firth looks at the pictures of her five kids, she wonders how three of them ended up being diagnosed with cancer.

Eight years ago, at age 23, John was diagnosed with brain cancer. Two years later, Molly was found to have the same type of brain tumor. She lost her battle last year.

Mary Francis was diagnosed with melanoma on her face lymph nodes and hip.
“I sometimes don’t know how to deal with it,” Andrea said. “It seems so bizarre, and you wonder how could this happen?”

Andrea Firth and her husband both have a history of colon, breast and skin cancer in their immediate families. The family is now undergoing testing at the University of Texas Cancer Center, to see if the cancers are genetically linked.

The Firth family hopes to take their painful struggle with cancer and turn it into a positive, hoping to one day help find a cure. The Firths help raise money in the Brain Tumor Society’s Ride for Research.

An oncologist at New Hanover Regional Medical Center said a genetic link between different types of cancer is extremely rare, but not unheard of. There is a small chance the family could have a dominant abnormal mutating gene creating the soft tissue cancers.

He’s never met the Firth family, but hopes to speak with them soon, in hopes of finding an answer to the question of cancer, and genes.