Leukemia Has Won

Post by xvector » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

ridgeguy wrote: post #83

ergothus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...some foe personified. > ...make sure he doesn't think he lost anything While I have vast respect for those that can have a different viewpoint, I'm not sure I'd be able to look on it as anything but an intensely personal attack from the universe that definitely takes things - notably, a future - away from me. With time I might find the wisdom to feel otherwise. But time is what would be taken away.

It's not personal, but it's no less an attack for that. I hope death ultimately resolves to an engineering problem.

Post by pluma » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

looperhacks wrote: post #132

JanSt wrote: post #119

There is something you can do to help people with leukemia: register as a stem cell donor. Germany has a very strong system with 71.000 stem cell or bone marrow donations per year while there are only 11.000 cases of leukemia in Germany - most go to the rest of the world. There are 5.7 million registered donors[1] (total population is around 80 million). [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DKMS

This. Registering is very easy, at least in Germany. I did it because I stumbled upon an event that did a mass registration, but you can also request a kit that contains everything you need to register. Just send the cotton swab (?) back, it's easy and no pain involved. Please look up whether there's an organization near you that offers services like this.

Post by TomMarius » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 11:23 AM UTC

ljm wrote: post #95

TomMarius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that simply reflect their life and thoughts?

How would you know what part of their life and their thoughts it reflects? What if they don't give a shit about the illness but everybody else makes the biggest deal of it?

Post by Namari » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 12:24 PM UTC

bradknowles wrote: post #30

joshgel wrote: post #15

As a human it makes me so sad to read this post. I hope the rest of his life is meaningful, comfortable and pain-free. As a doctor it makes me so mad. We talk about winning and losing against cancer like its some game or some foe personified. Just because there aren't any more chemo therapy options doesn't mean there aren't treatment options. Just because he'll be home and not in the hospital doesn't mean his doctors…

I am a thyroid cancer survivor. My mom had lung cancer. My dad had kidney cancer. We've had cats with cancer. One thing I've learned is that the single most important resource we get in life is the amount of time we have on this planet, and what we do with it. Once you get to the point where there are no more treatments that doctors can give you to try to stop or slow down cancer, and the only thing they can do is tr…

Post by sbarre » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #134

Gatsky wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a medical oncologist[1], your paragraph and that paternalistic and annoying article you cited makes me mad. The outrage with 'our language around cancer' is a recent phenomenon, and I think it is actually not that important and even harmful. What you are proposing is to homogenise how patients cope with cancer, assuming that one way of dealing with it is qualitatively better than another. This 'one way' is a kind…

>Who are we to tell them that they aren't thinking about things the right way? you're an oncologist. Would it be an unreasonable expectation that you have observed/learned a correlation, if any, between patient outcomes and the various ways of thinking the patients practiced, and thus that you may have an idea what is the "right way" and what isn't?