ST. LOUIS – A St. Louis doctor is looking into cancer rates across the region, trying to figure out why he’s seeing more younger patients. 

One of his younger patients was Dre Bergeson, a loving wife to her husband, Darryl, and mother to their 8-year-old son, Finn. 

“She was kind, compassionate, and loving, always thinking about everyone else but herself, even through the diagnosis,” Darryl Bergeson said.

He said Dre began having heartburn and pain in August of last year. She had a CT scan in September.

“There was a large mass on her kidney. After that, she had surgery. Kidney and spleen removed in October. At the end of October, she thought everything was gone,” Bergeson said.

Just two weeks after Dre turned 37 and right before Christmas, life turned upside down.

 “Chromophobe renal cell carcinoma. I never thought I would know that. It was aggressive, and it just didn’t stop,” Bergeson said. “It was after our doctor looked at it and figured it out and was like, there is no way you should have this cancer right here.”

The young mother and wife lost her battle to cancer on April 15. Darryl said they had a sendoff for her at their home that they spent two years building together, a home Dre got to live in for just six months. 

Dre’s doctor is Dr. Gautum Agarwal, a urologic oncologist with Mercy. He said he’s seeing a trend in rare cases. 

“These patients were younger and were being diagnosed with sometimes more aggressive and more rare types of tumors and they happened to be coming from, you know, Coldwater Creek or Weldon Spring, and I noticed this trend was occurring,” Agarwal said. 

The trend led Agarwal to become the director of Precision Medicine. 

“With the main goal of catching disease earlier, and that is utilizing early cancer detection tests using genomics and using artificial intelligence to look at our populations to say who may be at the highest risk of developing cancer,” Agarwal said. 

He said a multi-cancer early detection screening is changing lives with just one blood sample. 

“It is really disheartening when you get a patient that has a cancer that is found much later than it should. We know that when you catch a cancer early, before it even forms sometimes, precancerous, and then sometimes in that stage one, really early cancer, it is a cure essentially,” Agarwal said. 

Bergeson wonders if the multi-cancer early detection screening could have given him more time with Dre. 

“She didn’t deserve to die. That’s really what it boils down to and I want people to know about this situation here,” Bergeson said. “It is just hard. She was my best friend.”

FOX 2 News reached out to the Francis Howell School District for a comment to see if the district conducts its own testing, separate from the government.

“Several years ago, the district utilized a third-party to conduct environmental testing. Test results met regulatory environmental standards, and additional testing has not been conducted since,” the district said in a statement to FOX 2.