201–210 of 310 posts
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I had seriously contemplated suicide multiple times in my life (about 6 so far), and every time I managed to escape the intrusive thoughts. I have a heart condition and I may just drop dead, thus living alone means that there is nobody to regurgitate me. The way I have reconciled this is through accepting that I have already died, thus every day is a gift.
Oops. This was supposed to write resuscitate.
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So many stories like yours. They are one of the reasons living in the United States never appealed to me. With Christmas coming up this must be a very hard time for you, hang in there.
I've lived in India, UK and USA for atleast 5 years in each. I would take USA in a heartbeat if I can have good insurance You are getting cutting edge care in USA. For example, My father has prostate cancer and latest NCNN guidelines recommend 'triplet therapy' [1] at diagnosis and is the standard in USA. But in UK they you only get chemo and ADT via NHS. They also have major delays (years) in getting latest medical…
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I don't think they can have the same experience as they are "insiders" to the system. Doctors and their families don't wait for appointments for months, aren't the last ones checked by the nurses in the hospitals, and get a variety of preferential treatment that makes their experience completely removed from the reality that the average person experiences.
My father was a doctor. You are correct: as patients they get preferential treatment. As often do their immediate family members. It's something I'm ashamed about when I look back at my own childhood.
Blatant favoritism is obviously wrong in the treatment of doctors and their families. That’s not what I’m talking about (it’s disgusting). Them knowing how to use the convoluted system is different, though, and I don’t think it’s something of which you should be ashamed. Especially if you/they work to make it a better system.
If the parent comments have made it to this response: I’m sorry for your loss. Watching my healthy grandfather fall apart and die during the peak of the pandemic was a wake up call for me regarding the sad state of our healthcare system.
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I went through this with my then 94-year-old grandfather a couple of years ago. I ultimately came away from the situation realizing that things only got done when you actively threaten people and force them take action. Doctor doesn't want to properly follow up on a stage-iv foot ulcer and home wound care misses scheduled appointments? Ok, we're going to the ER and telling them that the doctor doesn't respond to his…
The problem is cost. You're a good grandson for fighting for your grandpa, but there's no way we can afford the level of care you're demanding for every person close to end of life. It's inherently a futile battle.
Sending a nurse to do a wound check daily is much cheaper than ambulatory travel to an ER (or even doctors office).
Moving him to our house was cheaper than a nursing facility.
Hospice was obviously far cheaper than any continuing care.
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Death is something people in my culture try not to think about much. It is considered that the dead are totally dead and gone, never to be spoken to again and spoken of with sadness and distance. People of other cultures think differently about death. Death is welcomed into the day to day life. Consciousness of death is invited, even celebrated. The dead are spoken to. This second group of people don't believe in the…
The processes in your brain and body that are your consciousness stop and you cease to be forever. After that point nothing that happens or happened matters to you because you no longer exist. Various cultures, religions, spiritual people want to deny this. They're probably happier for it, but I can only accept the dull explanation that we just stop and it's not very interesting.
That possibility makes sense, but I don't really know enough about the universe to be certain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had seriously contemplated suicide multiple times in my life (about 6 so far), and every time I managed to escape the intrusive thoughts. I have a heart condition and I may just drop dead, thus living alone means that there is nobody to regurgitate me. The way I have reconciled this is through accepting that I have already died, thus every day is a gift.
Oops. This was supposed to write resuscitate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lived in India, UK and USA for atleast 5 years in each. I would take USA in a heartbeat if I can have good insurance You are getting cutting edge care in USA. For example, My father has prostate cancer and latest NCNN guidelines recommend 'triplet therapy' [1] at diagnosis and is the standard in USA. But in UK they you only get chemo and ADT via NHS. They also have major delays (years) in getting latest medical…
I'm in NL and absolutely not concerned about the quality of health care here or what it will cost. Insurance here is very good and reasonably affordable.
https://www.ajmc.com/view/nice-rejects-provenge-says-treatme...
It was apparently available under some clinical trial but that trial wasn't recruiting at that point.
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I went through this with my then 94-year-old grandfather a couple of years ago. I ultimately came away from the situation realizing that things only got done when you actively threaten people and force them take action. Doctor doesn't want to properly follow up on a stage-iv foot ulcer and home wound care misses scheduled appointments? Ok, we're going to the ER and telling them that the doctor doesn't respond to his…
The problem is cost. You're a good grandson for fighting for your grandpa, but there's no way we can afford the level of care you're demanding for every person close to end of life. It's inherently a futile battle.
You are referencing a pernicious myth - a classic selection bias. For the majority of illnesses we don’t know whether someone is near the end of their life or not. We all “know” that people tend to have expensive care just before they die, but the selection bias occurs because we ignore the counterfactual where people have expensive care and then go on to live for many years afterwards. Edit: A study found “most people who die aren’t expected to, and many people who are expected to die don’t. In particular, less than 10 percent of those who die within 12 months had a predicted mortality above 50 percent. And if beneficiaries are ranked by their predicted mortality, the group with a high chance of dying accounted for only 5 percent of total Medicare spending, and among them about half survived in any case, perhaps in part due to the health care they received. As the study's authors conclude, ‘These findings suggest that a focus on end-of-life spending is not, by itself, a useful way to identify wasteful spending.’” https://archive.ph/gUzzO
Also “total spending on end-of-life care is only 9 percent of the total cost of health care”. Chronic condition are where costs lie.
And US healthcare costs have not really risen: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
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I am curious about your last paragraph. What does it mean?
Death is something people in my culture try not to think about much. It is considered that the dead are totally dead and gone, never to be spoken to again and spoken of with sadness and distance. People of other cultures think differently about death. Death is welcomed into the day to day life. Consciousness of death is invited, even celebrated. The dead are spoken to. This second group of people don't believe in the…
Beautifully said. Exactly matches my own perception. The width of this distribution is helped by conversations shared with people, books read together, movies watched, games played. "Common" memories. I think the momentum to write, to make art generally is driven by this instinctive intuition, desire to extend the life of one's consciousness in the community. We really don't die until we're completely forgotten.
Was going to ask for any reading recommendation, but noticed the Hofstadter right there. Thank you!
I was lucky. They got detected early and hadn’t metastasized.
But holy hell was radiation treatment terrible. When I had my first round of chemo to ready me for my first round of radiation, it was easy to “ignore” the chemo. I can’t find the comment now, but they basically state “You get up, you go in, you get sick, you go home, rinse and repeat”. It sucked, but I could muscle through it. The radiation treatments? Damn. By the time the burning sensation in my neck and face got to a point I could ignore it, it was time to go in for another session. By the 3rd session of the 3rd week, my oncologist prescribed me sleeping and high dosage pain pills. My pharmacist didn’t want to refill my pain meds the 3rd time. Thought I had a pill doc that was letting me abuse them.
But all through the pain and the uncertainty, the thing that affected me the most was - I really learned who, in my social circle, I could count on. Made me realize that most of my social circle is acquaintances not friends. Not loved ones.
So cancer really opened my eyes to human connection. Now I just gotta figure out how to do it :)