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Leukemia Has Won

alex.blog

21–30 of 196 posts

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#21
Incredible sad read and I wish you the best of luck if any journey is ahead of you. We will all come pretty soon after you! Wordpress is an awesome tool and project. I don't know you or your work but I'm sure it's just awesome. Thanks for improving the open source world for us with your skills!

Whenever faced with death in my life, I have always found comfort in Richard Dawkins wonderful speech.

I hope you'll do the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#22
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…

> ...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.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#24
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…

When her last chemo failed, my Mom lived for about two weeks, in excruciating agony despite intensive care.

Leukemia won, there was no other way to put it.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#25
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 feel weird about the status of cancer.. it seems there's so much progress that it hurts with a different taste nowadays.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#26
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…

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 dealing with it.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#27

Whenever I’m studying a given topic, I like to buy maybe 6 or 7 books on it to skim-read from someplace where that’s afforable like HPB or Thriftbooks. Gives you a good overview of field and also each of the books fills in the holes of the other books. Recently did this on the topic of “cancer”. All recent books published in the last 15 years by Big 5 Publishers. Every single book had intense criticism for the NIH. I…

What is the alternative? Wild guess based research? Faith based research? I'm having a hard time envisioning how you'd design an experiment, and extract knowledge, without a hypothesis.

[deleted]

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#28
Reading through some of the past posts, he seems to have quite a stoic view of his situation (saying he's 'along for the ride'). Indeed, there's nothing he can do about it, it makes no sense to stress about it. I hope I'm able to feel similarly when it comes time for me.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#30
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 try to make you as comfortable as possible, I don't see any other way that we could possibly look at this situation than an almost complete loss.

But maybe I'm too close to the problem.

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