Thanks Alex for living a good life, and sharing your work. Thank you also for the reminder to live every day like it is your last.
Leukemia Has Won
121–130 of 196 posts
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#122Sorry to hear this, I never know what to say in these situations but I wish you and your family the best.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#123As 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 was diagnosed with lymphoma about 8 years ago. It's been undetectable since six months later, and I haven't had any treatment since the three years of chemo ended, but that's not to say it won't return. I've always disliked the "winning/losing" paradigm, and also terms like "struggle" and "battle". To me, they all imply that there was or is something that I personally could have done to change the outcome. If I had…
Cancer treatment outcome is unpredictable, some patients with a good prognosis die from the disease or treatment complications and some patients with extremely bad prognosis eventually get cured. The science is unable to track exact reasons so we may suppose that certain brain activity may produce hormones or mediators that play a role in success or failure of treatment. So staying strong and in a fighting mood and perceiving your treatment as a fight may be important. Or may not. But still it is so much important from the existential point of view, to not go quietly.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#124There 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
I found this website that lists the equivalent organisations around the world - or at least, it lists DKMS for Germany, and the one I know to be correct for the Netherlands: https://swabtheworld.com/become-a-donor/
For one reason or another they don't link directly to those organisations, but if you have the name, you should be able to find out the rest.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#125As 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…
"Using the battle metaphor implies that if a patient fights hard enough, smart enough, and/or long enough, he or she will be able to win the war."
No it doesn't.
I imagine that the battle metaphor is comforting to some people for precisely the opposite reasons.
Being drafted into infantry (stereotypical mental image of a battle) there is likely no good outcome. The best case is probably a deeply unpleasant, emotionally and possibly physically painful, experience. The worst case outcome is death.
Ability to personally influence the outcome is limited at best. You can fight long, hard and smart and still find yourself on the losing side.
I have no direct experience of cancer but if I did, I'm not sure I would appreciate a critique of my choice of language.
If I found comfort in a metaphor then I'd hardly like for my doctor to point out that the metaphor is a cliche or a trope.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#126Mortality is one of those things that I grow more accustomed to the older I get. I hate it. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about death or things that cause death. Death is everywhere — the news, social media — two things I try to avoid. However, we cannot avoid death. We are all just living to die.
That's the downturn of Western philosophy that we are raised on. We perceive death as an opposite to life while naturally they are the parts of the same cycle.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Death comes for us all, sooner or later, one way or another. That's one of the few truisms in life. I'm genuinely making an effort to understand how this is relevant to someone with a cancer diagnosis. Sure, dead comes sooner or later, and that's the whole point of why one would feel it sucks and that we're losing, because often cancer means for you, dead came way too early. I have not known anyone with cancer, but…
It's relevant to anyone who's facing their own death, which is all of us. Knowing that everyone goes through the same thing is comforting.
Is not the same dying at 80 from 'natural causes' than at 35 due to cancer after a grueling experience fighting it. Which is why I don't see how I'd find that comforting if I were diagnosed cancer when still 'young'. That's just me though.
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#128As 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…
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…
Isn't an oncologist always medical ... ?
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#129It's too early to bury Alex. Donor immune system may still rise up and kill leukemia cells while leaving some liver tissue for it to regenerate. Not so much of a chance but still...
Re: Leukemia Has Won
#130Earlier 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…
Isn't an oncologist always medical ... ?
No - as they explained, medical oncologists treat with drugs. Surgical oncologists operate on cancer patients, and radiation oncologists treat with radiation. https://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/cancer-basics/...