Starting Hospice

You have been such an inspiration in how to make something impossible almost bearable. You are doing the hardest of hard things so well. Thank you for sharing and hope you find peace

Sad reminder that we are all here for a limited time and we don't really know how long that will be.

My partner died of an internal SCC in their early 40s during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, over a course of 9 months.

After the tumor board of the only cancer treatment center both covered by our insurance and willing to take us on refused to pursue anything but standard ovarian chemotherapy (which didn't work at all on ovarian SCC, which we already knew). Because of travel restrictions and the total lack of vaccines at the time, we couldn't travel to seek more aggressive treatment, so we pursued clinical trials.

My partner qualified for a trial only after chemotherapy started doing nerve damage, and was approved only after being judged too ill by the oncologist to take the drugs when they finally arrived. The courier showed up with $20,000 of useless drugs two days before hospice started. After my partner's death, I was told to dump them, unopened, after begging the oncologist and company to find someone else who could use them.

Bess' advocacy for access to trials for terminal and near-terminal patients is invaluable. If there's anything people can try to do, it's to help in this effort long before you or a loved one become too sick to benefit from it.

Jake has a hard road ahead, and so does Bess. All we can do is push to make sure nobody else has to fight as hard for, or be outright refused, the ability to fight for even potentially effective treatment.

Low-hanging fruit of dodgy medical claims aside: why would you post this as a response to someone announcing that they are shortly going to die from cancer? Is the intent to make the point that this person's current situation could likely have been avoided if they had simply followed a particular diet regimen? Or perhaps as a PSA to others who may currently be facing cancer themselves?

Irrespective of the value or veracity of the specific advice offered, to comment something like this here is supremely tone-deaf. Read the room.

Talk to your doctor, and ask to be screened for all common cancers. A colonoscopy is in your future (I just had one). Also ask for a Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Test. Also look into the HPV vaccine.