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Leukemia Has Won

alex.blog

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Re: Leukemia Has Won

#181

Post by telescope »

gfs78 wrote: post #175
telescope wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fighting attitude is harmful if it leads you to prioritize prolonging life at any cost.

Some people prefer to contemplate and accept. Some people prefer to fight hard until the end. Who are we to decide how people are supposed to live, or die?

Indeed—it's a personal decision that every patient and family have to make based on their individual situation. (Just as mine had to.)

That's why a categorical claim that there's no harm to having fighting attitude is patently wrong...not to mention harmful because it contributes to the stigmatization of accepting and preparing for impending death.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#182

Post by pvaldes »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #180
pvaldes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miracles do not happen. What he needs is a donor and a crowdfunding campaign.

Miracles are just statically unlikely occurrences according to the viewer. By stating they don't happen, you are alluding to an absolute truth, which can not be proven.

I have a different definition of miracle than yours.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#183

Post by nyokodo »

V-2 wrote: post #137
waynecochran wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps calling it a “battle” or naming cancer the “enemy” gives some a cathartic way to cope with it. Gives one energy so to speak. My parents died of cancer and I have lost several friends to it, and none of them used this terminology, but I imagine I will if it comes to it.

I get this, by why only cancer? There are other generally lethal (though treatable) diseases in the world. Yet you typically don't get to hear about somebody's, say, "battle with diabetes", or "battle with AIDS".

I can't speak for you but the term "battle with " is frightfully common. Copy and paste both your example quotes into google and see for yourself.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#184

Post by nikolay »

Cancer is life, not death on the micro level. Okay, maybe a shortsighted and cellfish (my play of words) struggle for life, but aren't we as a civilization doing the same thing right now? Anyway, if we keep vilifying cancer without understanding it, we'll end up "losing". I'm saddened to hear that a good developer and an open-source contributor has been struck with this fate. As a civilization with bold claims to fame, we should really focus on these mass killers rather than building bigger bombs and walls. I mean, come on, we can't even treat the flu and thousands die every year!

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#185

Post by babyloneleven »

specialist wrote: post #89
iooi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the same note, highly recommend "Being Mortal", which talks a lot about that mindset and palliative care. It can be really damaging to think in terms of winners and losers since you might end up going through a lot more pain than necessary. It can be really beneficial for everyone involved to readjust goals and make the best out of the situation. Dying is part of life, and we need to be better at accepting and dea…

Life is a celebration. Every day a gift. I have a chronic life threatening disease. Side effects from a bone marrow transplant when I was kid. I recognize the stages of bereavement in others (patients, caregivers, family, friends). The only difference between me and them is I had decades to process my mortality, to learn how to cope. Sort of. Surviving is a strange gift. Live long enough and you'll see that you're no…

Since you mentioned Buddhism you probably know what it's about, but for the benefit of someone that might be curious,

The Buddhist perspective is that none of this is actually real. It's all an elaborate illusion. The battle is an illusion, the cancer is an illusion, and death itself is an illusion.

Like the film Matrix, we live in a virtual world. Everything we see is a creation of our mind. All our perspectives, experiences, everything we feel, our cravings and impulses, none of this is actually real.

Our mind has both the power to create anything but also the power to understand how fragile and empty those creations are. Everyone has the Buddha nature.

Anyway what Buddha discovered is that we suffer because we are attached to the creations of our mind (such as the idea of being alive and the fear of dying). And he proposed a fix that is very simple, just see reality as it is: empty. Devoid of substance. That's it. This insight is elaborated in four points and is called the four noble truths.

Now, Buddhism isn't an intellectual exercise. Just having a cognitive understanding of the Buddhist philosophy is too limited and isn't how you practice Buddhism. Just believing in Buddha or any teaching is useless.

You practice Buddhism by having the right motivation (which is to bring benefits to all beings - since they, too, deserve to be free from suffering), having the right vision and acting the right way. This can be elaborated in eight points and comprise the noble eightfold path if you want to look up.

To follow this path, you need to convince your unconscious mind of those goals: too often we know what's the right thing to do but fail to act on it. And it's much easier to understand Buddha's insight than to fully incorporate it into your unconscious mind.

We do this by training the mind through meditation. Meditating helps you to release yourself from the slavery of always having to follow your own desires and impulses, but also enables the deepest parts of your mind to perceive reality as it really is. It's Buddha's mind hack.

It's never too late to practice a little bit of meditation. Just search for some guided meditation video on YouTube and follow it (5 mins is enough). You don't really need to believe anything nor abandon your religion and it may benefit you and, due to the way it changes you, benefit those around you.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#186

Post by babyloneleven »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #78
jrobn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is the ultimate joke. We spend so much time worrying about it. Avoiding it. Writing poetry and books about it. Maybe, If your a Religious being, even shaping our entire life around it because of the “ultimate judgement” in the end. Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.

What could you possibly mean by that last sentence?

I don't know what he or she meant, but I wrote a comment elsewhere on the thread about a Buddhist perspective that touches on this. Ctrl+f Buddhism.

The tldr is that all our experiences are constructions of our mind. It's our mind that assigns meaning to stuff. Being alive or dead isn't a pre-existing concept, it's something we constructed.

An exercise is to imagine some beings very different from ourselves looking at Earth and not recognizing life. Perhaps because they exist in a different timescale, or they structure data differently. They wouldn't be able to see we dying.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#187

Post by babyloneleven »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #78
jrobn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is the ultimate joke. We spend so much time worrying about it. Avoiding it. Writing poetry and books about it. Maybe, If your a Religious being, even shaping our entire life around it because of the “ultimate judgement” in the end. Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.

What could you possibly mean by that last sentence?

Another perspective is that we're like an ML model that takes tons of raw data and extract features from it, and infer stuff like "x is alive" and "y is dying". We insist that the features we extracted are the real thing, instead of a summarization that enables us to understand the world.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#188

Post by agent008t »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #153
agent008t wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. What is the "correct" course of action to have it diagnosed early / maximize odds of survival?

The earlier the better. Depending on the cancer type early diagnosis of e.g. skin cancer has almost 100% survival( cure) rates. Early diagnosis of lung cancer gives the option of removing the whole section of the lung. Decreases the maximum oxygen supply rate but not enough to affect daily life. Generally speaking if it's early we can cut it more easily, radiate the specific area instead of many different ones that c…

So are there some specific symptoms one should look out for? Some comprehensive periodic tests? Maybe combined with some genetic pre-screening?

Given how important it can be to diagnose these things early, I think most people have no idea how they could or should do it - apart from maybe breast and testicular cancer.

If you were to design a policy for someone that wanted to maximize their survival probability with regards to potential cancers while still leading a normal life, and money was no object, what would that policy look like?

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#189

Post by V-2 »

nyokodo wrote: post #183
V-2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this, by why only cancer? There are other generally lethal (though treatable) diseases in the world. Yet you typically don't get to hear about somebody's, say, "battle with diabetes", or "battle with AIDS".

I can't speak for you but the term "battle with " is frightfully common. Copy and paste both your example quotes into google and see for yourself.

I'm not sure if these variations are nearly as popular, at least in epitaphia. But I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't really argue about it. In my first language (Polish) people die "after a long battle with cancer", and I feel like it's very rare to come across the same phrase in reference to some other illness.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#190

Post by darod »

agent008t wrote: post #131
oh_sigh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were your symptoms? How were you originally diagnosed?

This. What is the "correct" course of action to have it diagnosed early / maximize odds of survival?

I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I found out when I saw blood in my stool. I went to the doc and the rest is history. When I was diagnosed it was already at stage 2. Honestly, unless you're getting CT scans twice a year, there's really no cheap and easy way to stay ahead of the game. My docs have had me get CT scans every 3-6 months and have caught subsequent metastases early by doing so. However, unless you are currently under treatment or at the age that requires a specific type of cancer screening, it'd be hard to get that approved by an insurance company. It's worth asking though.
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