All My Life (2020) and Advanced Liver Cancer

Jenn Carter and Solomon Chau meet, fall for each other and get engaged. He is training to be a chef. Then Solomon is diagnosed with liver cancer.

Surgery follows, and for a while the news is good. A later scan shows the cancer has spread, and the timeline collapses. Their friends start a crowdfunding campaign, and the wedding is pulled forward and built in a matter of weeks by the people around them.

The wedding happens. Solomon gets worse afterwards and dies. Jenn is left with what he arranged in advance: a recorded message, and a honeymoon he had quietly paid for. His friends open a restaurant named after his motto, "Now or Never".

The real couple lived in Toronto. Solomon Chau was 26 when he was diagnosed with liver cancer in December 2014 and had surgery to remove a tumour. In March 2015 he was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pain, and doctors found the disease was now terminal. He and Jenn married on 11 April 2015. He died on 17 August 2015, and his funeral was held on 22 August, the date they had originally chosen for the wedding.

Everything below assumes you know how it ends.

The film's best instinct is that a short prognosis is a logistics problem as much as a grief problem.

Families really do this. They compress plans. They crowdfund. They hand tasks to friends because there is no time to be proud. Decisions that would normally take a year get made in an afternoon. The crowdfunding thread is not invented; it is what happened.

The film is also honest that a "successful" cancer operation is not the end of the story. Months later a scan shows the disease has spread. That sequence is common and most films skip it, because it spoils the shape of a recovery arc.

Jenn becomes a fiancée and a carer at the same time. Solomon spends his last months preparing things for her to find later. Both are recognisable behaviours in people living with a terminal diagnosis, and neither is treated as a stunt.

Solomon stays photogenic and mostly comfortable almost to the end.

Advanced liver cancer usually looks different. The abdomen swells with fluid. The skin and eyes turn yellow. Appetite disappears, fatigue is total, pain is common, and toxins the liver can no longer clear cause confusion. Very little of that reaches the screen.

Treatment decisions, chemotherapy, scan results and palliative care mostly happen between scenes. The disease functions as a deadline for a wedding rather than as an illness with its own demands.

The film also never asks the obvious question. Why does a 26-year-old get liver cancer? That silence matters, because the answer is where the useful information lives.

Early liver cancer often causes nothing at all. By the time it announces itself, it is frequently advanced.

The CDC lists these later symptoms:

• Discomfort in the upper abdomen on the right side.
• A swollen abdomen.
• A hard lump on the right side just below the rib cage.
• Pain near the right shoulder blade or in the back.
• Jaundice, meaning yellowing of the skin and the whites of the eyes.
• Easy bruising or bleeding.
• Unusual tiredness.
• Nausea and vomiting.
• Loss of appetite.
• Weight loss for no known reason.

Jaundice and a swelling abdomen are the two most people recognise, and both are late. That is the core problem with this cancer: the early window is silent.

The CDC lists what raises the risk of liver cancer: long-term hepatitis B or hepatitis C infection, cirrhosis, heavy alcohol use, smoking, being overweight or obese, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diabetes, haemochromatosis, and eating food contaminated with aflatoxin.

Several of those can be acted on now, years before anything is wrong. The CDC's own list of ways to lower risk is short and concrete: keep a healthy weight and stay active, get vaccinated against hepatitis B, get tested for hepatitis C and treated if you have it, do not smoke, and avoid drinking too much.

Chronic hepatitis B and C often cause no symptoms for decades. A person can carry either for thirty years and feel fine. That is why testing, rather than waiting to feel unwell, is the step that changes anything.

There is no routine liver cancer screening for adults at average risk. NCI states plainly that there is no standard or routine screening test for liver cancer.

Ultrasound, CT and the alpha-fetoprotein blood test are used or studied in people already known to be at high risk. That is surveillance, not screening. The difference is who it is for. Screening is offered to a whole population; surveillance is offered to people with an identified reason to be watched, chiefly cirrhosis or chronic hepatitis B or C.

Which puts the practical question in an unexpected place. It is not "should I be scanned for liver cancer?" It is "have I ever been tested for hepatitis B and C?" That test is what decides whether anyone should be watching your liver at all.

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All My Life is a decent film about a real couple and a poor guide to the disease that killed one of them.

Solomon Chau's cancer arrived without warning at 26, and the film treats that as fate. In the wider picture, liver cancer is one of the cancers where prevention genuinely bites: a vaccine, two blood tests and a treatable infection.

If you have never been tested for hepatitis B or C, that is the question this film should send you to ask. All My Life cannot tell you what to watch for, but screening and possible warning signs can.

This page discusses All My Life for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email corrections@cancerexplained.org.