My Sister's Keeper (2009)

Anna was conceived as a genetic match for her older sister Kate, who has acute promyelocytic leukemia, and has provided blood, marrow and tissue since birth. At thirteen she hires a lawyer to sue her parents for medical emancipation rather than donate a kidney.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The ethical core is genuine. Saviour siblings exist, transplant teams do weigh a donor child's interests against a recipient's need, and the question of whether a minor can meaningfully consent to a procedure that benefits someone else is live. The toll on the well sibling — invisible, instrumentalised — is well drawn.

The medicine is compressed and sometimes wrong. Acute promyelocytic leukemia is now one of the most treatable of all leukemias; treatment with all-trans retinoic acid and arsenic trioxide achieves cure in the large majority of cases, which sits oddly with the film's trajectory. Kidney donation from a sibling is also not a standard part of leukemia care in the way the plot requires.

The early signs of leukemia are diffuse and easy to attribute elsewhere: fatigue that does not lift, frequent infections, easy bruising or bleeding, tiny red spots under the skin, bone or joint pain, night sweats, unexplained fever. In children these are frequently mistaken for a run of ordinary viruses. What should prompt evaluation is the combination and the persistence — bruising without cause alongside exhaustion and repeated infections. A blood count is a simple first test. Survival for childhood leukemia today is far better than screen fiction implies.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the only thing on the list you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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My Sister's Keeper is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to leukemia. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the one thing worth carrying away is that a change that persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].