I am a pancreatic cancer survivor. It is considered incurable in 2019 and I'm here because of a 1930s era surgery called a Whipple procedure. Around 9% survive five years or more -- a number that hasn't really changed.
In a belt plus suspenders move I underwent 2 rounds (six infusions per round) of chemo plus 28 consecutive weekdays of radiation after surgery. All my doctors are amazed at my recovery, a few saying the best they've seen (though it came with diabetes and a different digestive pathway).
Chemo was awful. Mine came with a bag of steroids first to mask the effects for a few days. I scheduled my sessions for Thursday, knowing it wouldn't hit me until Friday night. One Saturday I slept around 20 hours.
However, by the end we had figured out how to minimize the effect of the chemo. I needed my wife who watched me diligently. Cancer is not a one person job! She made sure every time I opened my eyes I stayed hydrated and ate something.
Chemo should have gotten worse. It actually got easier.
My cancer never caused me pain. The treatment... that's another story. I left the hospital with my belly held together by 16 staples.
Trying to help my wife through chemo now, and the staying hydrated and eating something is kicking our butts. Her oncologist believes that her nausea is due to directly to disease progression and it's relentless.
We're now on a regimen of phenergen every 6 hours but that just prevents cyclic nausea from occurring AND it knocks her out to where she's sleeping at least 20 hrs a day. Then when she wakes up she can only eat a little bit or she'll throw it back up. For hydration we finally just got home health giving her a liter twice a week plus a liter at chemo once a week.
She just recently over the past day or two has started to be able to hold a bit more down, but she's essentially got a form of PTSD from throwing up 5-10 times a day for 2-3 months.
Congrats to you on beating it man, especially pancreatic. This stuff really sucks.
A friend of mine had a Whipple procedure but it ruined his quality of life (he couldn't eat almost anything) and he died not long after. He wasn't even into his mid-40's, CMU alumnus and worked on XEmacs.
My father unfortunately passed away from the same cancer. 6 months after the diagnosis, having already done 6/8 chemo infusions. His liver was giving up by then. He also went from nearly 90kg to around 42kg in the end.
It is really a terrible cancer. He didn't have any symptoms until the year before his death. By then it was stage 4 already.
Traditional chemotherapy is toxic to all cells. Cancer cells grow rapidly (part of what makes them dangerous). So the toxic effect gets the cancer cells first, since cells that are growing take up the most chemotherapy. But other cells grow rapidly too, like hair and intestinal cells, which is why cancer patients lose their hair and have terrible nausea/diarrhea.
All (almost all?) cells take up some chemo. So, you are actually dying, just hopefully more slowly than the cancer. And then we stop the chemo before you all the way die.
This is why the bar for a cancer diagnosis is so high. We need biopsies to try to get as close to 100% accurate diagnosis as possible.
That's right. Chemotherapy is, sadly, a very primitive treatment.
I regret we have spent so much money on cancer genomics, when some outsiders where trying to push for immunotherapies. Thankfully, that changed 3 or 4 years ago.
In pharmacy school I was told the paradigm in infections diseases was to identify the amount of medication to kill the pathogen, then give a little more. In oncology, it's to identify the amount of medication that would kill the patient, then give a little less.
I've heard it put similarly bluntly - you hope the chemo kills the cancer before it kills you. I know a few people who are actively undergoing chemotherapy, and my grandfather died of pancreatic cancer (metastasised to liver IIRC), and it's quite clear the heavy tole it takes on them.
Visual loss is a very rare side effect of chemotherapy, and permanent visual loss even rarer. The more common and no less serious side effects of heart muscle damage and secondary leukemia are not mentioned in the tagline, being ill-suited as click bait I presume.
I have given the chemotherapy described here to many patients. There is wide variation in how patients experience chemotherapy. Some finish and tell me it wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm quite sure they only tell me things like this in the privacy of the consulting room. They would never say this to another patient in the waiting room. They feel bad for not having had the kind of widely publicised terrible experience.
Beyond the tagline, the account is reasonably accurate, although at times indulges in melodrama, about mitochondria of all things. It also doesn't do a good job of talking about the cognitive dysfunction associated with chemotherapy. This is a complex issue. In randomised trials, patients receiving placebo cancer treatments tend to report high rates of some cognitive problems. That chemotherapy itself is causal in every case is certainly in doubt. The mere experience of being diagnosed with cancer as you might imagine can have profound cognitive effects.
I am not quibbling for the sake of it. There are patients who decide not to have chemotherapy, and sometimes what they have heard about the experience from 'alternate' channels (such as newspaper taglines) has an out-sized influence on their decision. This is why a responsible editorial team would have had this article reviewed by medical professionals and patient advocates, and taken their advice about more judicious highlighting of potential side-effects. The article also doesn't quite deal with the fact that triple negative breast cancer is a really bad disease to have. Metastatic disease has a median overall survival of 18 months. If chemotherapy had not completely eradicated the cancer as it did in her case (the chances are about 50-50), 40% of patients develop metastatic disease in 3 years.
Chemotherapy is scary. It seems so counterintuitive to choose to inflict this kind of damage to oneself, in the hopes that it will prevent an even worse outcome.
Part of it is that there is this nagging feeling that it might not even be the right approach, given the legion of side effects of all kinds. Even oncologists get vague and evasive when this is questioned. In the end we can only rely on generalized statistics about survival rates, unsure of how it applies to individual situations.
I disagree with the anger people often show towards cancer. It's like people project some kind of malignant personality onto the phenomenon. I think of it as a natural part of life, like early hair loss. You can die from it, but death comes anyway, for one reason or another. At least with cancer you have time to get used to the idea, unlike an accident, heart attack or whatever. I guess I am a bit of a fatalist.
A line from a passage I remember reading as a medical student, has stuck with me after a decade and a half. It described anticancer therapies as having the effect of "... poisoning patients to the edge of their existence..." It is not my belief that the side effect profile of anti tumor drugs has improved much.
So, yeah. Treatments for cancer can suck just as badly as the disease itself.
That’s not just the effect, it’s the mechanism of action for chemo — right?
It takes advantage of cancers rerouting blood and being overly aggressive in gathering resources to make those the first of your cells to die as you’re poisoned to death, on the theory that there’s some slightly sublethal dosage that kills only some of your cells (and hopefully, the cancerous ones).
My father was diagnosed with lung cancer 4 years ago. He is on his third round of chemo. I recommend reading "The Emperor of all Maladies" for an insightful book on cancer. Even though medicine has made great progress fighting cancer, the scorched earth approach is what most of these treatments come down to.
PBS produced a documentary film named Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies in 2015, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,
I knew two people who both got cancer about the same time. One said no to chemo. The other said yes to chemo.
The differences in quality of life until death were dramatic. Neither had a longer life than was expected had they not taken the chemo, but the one who did lost hair, physical dexterity, then life. Suffered greatly.
The other one suffered much less, but still died.
The doctors all said take the drugs. You don't have to take the drugs. Do the research. Chemo isn't always beneficial.
Same experience with me, except that the one who said no to chemo died, and the other who said yes is still alive and has recovered (yes, after hair loss and other side effects).
"Do the research" - research is what scientists do, not what is achieved by Googling. No medical treatment is 100% perfect, unfortunately, but I and others I know prefer to play the odds rather than not.
Statistically speaking, the doctors were probably right. The guy taking the chemo effectively traded a better chance of survival for worse short-term quality of life. (And lost the bet.) But yes, it’s good to know the chances, so that you can choose to die in relative peace as opposed to making the rest of your life very difficult for a marginal increase in your survival chance.
I know someone who smoked a pack her day her whole life, and died at 90 while remaining in good health for the age the decade before.
I know someone who never smoked in his life and got lung cancer at 52.
Does that mean anything? Should we now conclude that smoking prevents lung cancer?
Quality of life, health, remaining lifetime, sickness progressions are all very complex interactions. All you can do is what happens on average, and play the odds based on that.
My three parents all got cancer. The one that refused chemo was laughed at and insulted by her doctor. She had to make a courageous speach to be treated with respect.
I struggled to read the Guardian article thanks to the overly purple prose (I write professionally, that sort of writing really ticks me off), but the comment discussion here is fascinating.
I’m a cancer patient, a year out of chemo. Almost 1.5 years ago I was given 2-3 years to live. Bladder cancer metastasized to lymph, liver and lungs is not a good thing to have, apparently, and I was put onto a fairly aggressive chemo course to try and hold it at bay for a while.
The chemo was tough, but I started an intensive treatment course of my own at the same time: cannabis oil, large amounts every evening. It massively buffered my against the side effects; I had a good appetite and my hair got a bit thin but never got too bad. All the same I did very nearly die from sepsis a few days after I finished my chemo course – cannabis can’t help when your immune system is trashed and you pick up some normally minor and forgettable bug!
But the big deal for me is that scans now show “no evidence of disease” rather than just shrunk and static. My consultant is saying this level of response is unprecedented and he now expects to be having these meetings for years to come. I know we need proper large-scale trials, I know I’m presenting an anecdote here, and like most of y’all I’m suspicious of miracle cure stories. But the results I have now are SO far beyond anything my oncology team ever expected that I am convinced cannabis has played a significant part along with the chemo in the cancer battle itself.
I’ve been documenting my experiences and listing my methods and techniques in a blog. Is it acceptable to post the URL here?
As someone doing cancer research and running a clinical lab, diagnosing cancer every day, I read the accounts of folks with cancer with a certain degree of lachesism. I want to know what this is. I know chickenpox and a broken leg and I know what it's like to have a loved one with cancer. But the thing itself, I do not know.
I spend every waking moment thinking about how to hunt cancer. It used to be reflex, now it's been so long it's somewhere between habit and addiction. My cognitive self knows I don't want cancer. But there's definitely a weird, fucked up interest in what it's like.
I have a lot of admiration towards your “obsession”; it way more meaningful than any of mine, so respect! May I ask, in your opinion, what can I do to lower my chances of getting cancer. So far, I monitor grilled meat consumption, do yearly fasts and watch my carbs. I’d appreciate any advice :)
cancer treatment can also cause cancer and does - it was likely the cause of the death of my grandpa - but he got 10 more years due to a chemo-therapy from an otherwise lethal cancer - fuck cancer.
My gf had grade III brain cancer. She had chemo two times. As chemos go, the one for brain cancer is fairly bening. The only side effect was nausea on initial chemo dose. Easily countered by antiemetic given only before first few initial doses, later withdrawn. The only other side effect was low blood cell counts that didn't manifest any symptoms but caused chemo to be delayed by a week till it recovered. Steroids given for brain swelling had more effect as they increased her appetite and kept water in her body causing her face to swell a bit. Ask your doctor for medication that amplifies urine production if you are given steroids. That helped when she was given it for the second time. Also after steroids were stopped her skin needed few weeks to recover from being prone to acne.
Possibly the only drug that might have felt like it was killing her was the morphine, as it can depress respiratory system, but at this stage there were so many things that might have been killing her that it wasn't important.
If I ever have a cancer diagnosis that would require extreme treatment or a pro-longed period of suffering, i.e. stage 3 or 4, I'd seriously consider shooting myself rather enduring months if not years of agony.
In theory I'd have insurance, however why put my family through years of seeing me suffer and become a person they might not recognize?
2 years ago my Grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was supposed to begin a course of chemo and various other treatments but instead he gathered the family around for a dinner one night and asked us all for our blessing not to go for treatment, it was a rather surreal moment. He died about 4 months later, he took some painkillers and a couple of other medications that improved his quality of life and in the end we all agreed that it was the best way, when he passed away he really wasn't much different than before the cancer, we avoided all of the agony of a long drawn out fight and watching him fall apart in front of us, he died happy and with dignity.
100%. I've done a round of chemo once, and I was 16, possibly the fittest I have ever been, and blessed with willful stubbornness then. It sucked donkey dick then, and I'd have none of those advantages now or in the future.
Live life to the fullest, make peace with the world, and go out on your own terms. Far better than eking out a couple years of pain and suffering being slowly poisoned.
For sake of reference, please look into hospice. They care for the terminally ill, focused on your pain and symptoms, and attend to your emotional and spiritual needs.
It's much nicer, and easier than making a huge mess for your family to clean up.
Perhaps not a decision you can truly consider until you get there. I've always been quite open to the idea of euthanasia in principle, but now that I live with a degree of chronic pain, I find myself becoming _vehemently_ anti-suicide - I'm not going to let this beat me - and the worse the pain is, the more intense that feeling becomes.
I'm quite aware there is probably a level of pain that may start my thinking in the opposition direction though, and no doubt different people will have different thoughts on and approaches to this.
I've often thought the same thing. If I'm looking at treatment that doesn't seem worth it, why should my only other option be to die on cancer's terms? Why not choose my own terms? I've talked to my wife about this, and of course our agreement is to do it in a way where she doesn't have to find me or deal with the mess — but you're not alone in this idea.
Aspiring survivor of a stage 3 sarcoma here. I went through 8 months of treatment in 2016. I had no symptoms, no pain, NOTHING prior to being diagnosed. There was just a huge lump on my shoulder. The idea that I was about to willingly pump poison into my body and make myself sick when I felt perfectly fine was definitely hard to wrap my mind around. But, no question, it was the right thing to do. I'm married and have 2 young kids. Telling them I had cancer was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Thankfully, I live near one of the world's best hospitals and had amazing doctors and nurses. My treatment was in-patient and they kept me loaded full of fluids and anti-nausea meds. Yes, those 9 months were grueling, but they were bearable. I'm very fortunate. I've known others who've gone through much, much worse.
This is an alternative to maximum tolerated dosing chemotherapy (standard) and it is called adaptive chemotherapy [0]. The aim with adaptive chemotherapy is to just stop the cancer from growing larger and using the growth advantage of the chemosensitive cancer cells to keep the resistant cells under control. This approach is much easier on the patient. I would look very carefully at this approach if I was ever in need of considering chemo.
I've had multiple relatives have cancer, some multiple times. Two relatives had cancer twice. Another, five times. Assorted others had cancer at least once.
I took care of a relative following a mastectomy. Making sure she got adequately hydrated brought her fever down. I got two hours sleep her first night back from the hospital because I devotedly pushed fluids at every opportunity.
She coughed up phlegm after I made her get enough food and drink into her to drop her temperature a degree. She said I probably prevented post-operative pneumonia.
My late father had colon cancer in his late sixties. He lost a third of his body weight before it was diagnosed.
My parents were told to get their affairs in order. He wasn't supposed to live.
His surgery that was supposed to be two hours lasted six. The cancer was much more extensive than they expected, but it hadn't invaded other organs. They peeled it off the outside of them instead of cutting out parts of them.
He had a thirteen inch scar from sternum to pubic bone with a dent going around his belly button. My mother treated the scar with German Penaten cream and treated his skin with Penaten cream.
Her mother died from uterine cancer when my mother was in her teens. My mother was convinced that radiation treatments killed her mother. She always had some excuse why my dad couldn't make one of his radiation treatments every week.
He lived about another two decades.
The cancer clinic at Martin Army Hospital was impressed with the condition of dad's scar and asked what they were doing. My mother explained it was the Penaten cream. They added it to their regime.
After my father defied his sentence of death, the civilian cancer doctor that treated him interviewed my mother on tape for two hours and changed the practices of his clinic based on what she said. The doctor knew my mother is the person who kept my dad alive.
Their big thing was hydration. They calculated how much fluids he needed and they made sure he got enough every day. Caffeinated drinks and alcohol did not count.
When he was too sick to eat, she made him homemade milkshakes or slushies once or sometimes twice a day in place of meals. On not so bad days, I think she used milk, good quality ice cream and fresh fruit. On super bad days, she used ice, frozen fruit and fruit juice.
He was gaining so much weight during a time when most cancer patients are continuing to lose weight that his doctor yelled at her to slow it down. He had a long-standing heart condition and her doctor was afraid she was kill him by putting too much strain on his heart with the rapid weight gain while he was still undergoing treatment.
My mother wanted to be a doctor in her youth. She delivered babies in her teens. She never got to be a doctor, but she was always patching someone up as long as I can remember.
personal sad story: uncle diagnosed with stage4 (mets) in late dec, got rounds of chemo 4 months after the diagnosis during which time the tumors didn't grow (based on the few bits we could read in his file). But after the 3rd round his health dropped to the floor, didn't last long after that. I believe the toll on his system was just too high. And I'm curious what are the mechanisms at play.
I cannot possibly fathom the terrible experience of cancer patients going through chemo. My great hope though is that a bunch of these will be rendered treatable with the immunotherapy solutions out there and being developed right now, which though expensive today for most people today, might be bought down by the demand supply mechanics of economics....
[+] [-] geofffox|6 years ago|reply
In a belt plus suspenders move I underwent 2 rounds (six infusions per round) of chemo plus 28 consecutive weekdays of radiation after surgery. All my doctors are amazed at my recovery, a few saying the best they've seen (though it came with diabetes and a different digestive pathway).
Chemo was awful. Mine came with a bag of steroids first to mask the effects for a few days. I scheduled my sessions for Thursday, knowing it wouldn't hit me until Friday night. One Saturday I slept around 20 hours.
However, by the end we had figured out how to minimize the effect of the chemo. I needed my wife who watched me diligently. Cancer is not a one person job! She made sure every time I opened my eyes I stayed hydrated and ate something.
Chemo should have gotten worse. It actually got easier.
My cancer never caused me pain. The treatment... that's another story. I left the hospital with my belly held together by 16 staples.
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
We're now on a regimen of phenergen every 6 hours but that just prevents cyclic nausea from occurring AND it knocks her out to where she's sleeping at least 20 hrs a day. Then when she wakes up she can only eat a little bit or she'll throw it back up. For hydration we finally just got home health giving her a liter twice a week plus a liter at chemo once a week.
She just recently over the past day or two has started to be able to hold a bit more down, but she's essentially got a form of PTSD from throwing up 5-10 times a day for 2-3 months.
Congrats to you on beating it man, especially pancreatic. This stuff really sucks.
[+] [-] anon91831837|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odiroot|6 years ago|reply
My father unfortunately passed away from the same cancer. 6 months after the diagnosis, having already done 6/8 chemo infusions. His liver was giving up by then. He also went from nearly 90kg to around 42kg in the end.
It is really a terrible cancer. He didn't have any symptoms until the year before his death. By then it was stage 4 already.
I'm abstaining from alcohol since then.
[+] [-] colordrops|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshgel|6 years ago|reply
All (almost all?) cells take up some chemo. So, you are actually dying, just hopefully more slowly than the cancer. And then we stop the chemo before you all the way die.
This is why the bar for a cancer diagnosis is so high. We need biopsies to try to get as close to 100% accurate diagnosis as possible.
[+] [-] nextos|6 years ago|reply
I regret we have spent so much money on cancer genomics, when some outsiders where trying to push for immunotherapies. Thankfully, that changed 3 or 4 years ago.
[+] [-] bigwavedave|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmic_shame|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stordoff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elevenoh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|6 years ago|reply
I have given the chemotherapy described here to many patients. There is wide variation in how patients experience chemotherapy. Some finish and tell me it wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm quite sure they only tell me things like this in the privacy of the consulting room. They would never say this to another patient in the waiting room. They feel bad for not having had the kind of widely publicised terrible experience.
Beyond the tagline, the account is reasonably accurate, although at times indulges in melodrama, about mitochondria of all things. It also doesn't do a good job of talking about the cognitive dysfunction associated with chemotherapy. This is a complex issue. In randomised trials, patients receiving placebo cancer treatments tend to report high rates of some cognitive problems. That chemotherapy itself is causal in every case is certainly in doubt. The mere experience of being diagnosed with cancer as you might imagine can have profound cognitive effects.
I am not quibbling for the sake of it. There are patients who decide not to have chemotherapy, and sometimes what they have heard about the experience from 'alternate' channels (such as newspaper taglines) has an out-sized influence on their decision. This is why a responsible editorial team would have had this article reviewed by medical professionals and patient advocates, and taken their advice about more judicious highlighting of potential side-effects. The article also doesn't quite deal with the fact that triple negative breast cancer is a really bad disease to have. Metastatic disease has a median overall survival of 18 months. If chemotherapy had not completely eradicated the cancer as it did in her case (the chances are about 50-50), 40% of patients develop metastatic disease in 3 years.
[+] [-] sfjailbird|6 years ago|reply
Part of it is that there is this nagging feeling that it might not even be the right approach, given the legion of side effects of all kinds. Even oncologists get vague and evasive when this is questioned. In the end we can only rely on generalized statistics about survival rates, unsure of how it applies to individual situations.
I disagree with the anger people often show towards cancer. It's like people project some kind of malignant personality onto the phenomenon. I think of it as a natural part of life, like early hair loss. You can die from it, but death comes anyway, for one reason or another. At least with cancer you have time to get used to the idea, unlike an accident, heart attack or whatever. I guess I am a bit of a fatalist.
[+] [-] Lordarminius|6 years ago|reply
So, yeah. Treatments for cancer can suck just as badly as the disease itself.
[+] [-] FakeComments|6 years ago|reply
It takes advantage of cancers rerouting blood and being overly aggressive in gathering resources to make those the first of your cells to die as you’re poisoned to death, on the theory that there’s some slightly sublethal dosage that kills only some of your cells (and hopefully, the cancerous ones).
[+] [-] pcestrada|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hieloz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon1m0us|6 years ago|reply
The differences in quality of life until death were dramatic. Neither had a longer life than was expected had they not taken the chemo, but the one who did lost hair, physical dexterity, then life. Suffered greatly.
The other one suffered much less, but still died.
The doctors all said take the drugs. You don't have to take the drugs. Do the research. Chemo isn't always beneficial.
Sometimes... it's just hope.
[+] [-] mb_72|6 years ago|reply
"Do the research" - research is what scientists do, not what is achieved by Googling. No medical treatment is 100% perfect, unfortunately, but I and others I know prefer to play the odds rather than not.
[+] [-] zoul|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtech|6 years ago|reply
I know someone who never smoked in his life and got lung cancer at 52.
Does that mean anything? Should we now conclude that smoking prevents lung cancer?
Quality of life, health, remaining lifetime, sickness progressions are all very complex interactions. All you can do is what happens on average, and play the odds based on that.
[+] [-] justnotworthit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cancerwriter|6 years ago|reply
I’m a cancer patient, a year out of chemo. Almost 1.5 years ago I was given 2-3 years to live. Bladder cancer metastasized to lymph, liver and lungs is not a good thing to have, apparently, and I was put onto a fairly aggressive chemo course to try and hold it at bay for a while. The chemo was tough, but I started an intensive treatment course of my own at the same time: cannabis oil, large amounts every evening. It massively buffered my against the side effects; I had a good appetite and my hair got a bit thin but never got too bad. All the same I did very nearly die from sepsis a few days after I finished my chemo course – cannabis can’t help when your immune system is trashed and you pick up some normally minor and forgettable bug!
But the big deal for me is that scans now show “no evidence of disease” rather than just shrunk and static. My consultant is saying this level of response is unprecedented and he now expects to be having these meetings for years to come. I know we need proper large-scale trials, I know I’m presenting an anecdote here, and like most of y’all I’m suspicious of miracle cure stories. But the results I have now are SO far beyond anything my oncology team ever expected that I am convinced cannabis has played a significant part along with the chemo in the cancer battle itself.
I’ve been documenting my experiences and listing my methods and techniques in a blog. Is it acceptable to post the URL here?
[+] [-] nate_meurer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|6 years ago|reply
I spend every waking moment thinking about how to hunt cancer. It used to be reflex, now it's been so long it's somewhere between habit and addiction. My cognitive self knows I don't want cancer. But there's definitely a weird, fucked up interest in what it's like.
[+] [-] srik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liveoneggs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nisa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brent_noorda|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|6 years ago|reply
Possibly the only drug that might have felt like it was killing her was the morphine, as it can depress respiratory system, but at this stage there were so many things that might have been killing her that it wasn't important.
[+] [-] chrisan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] algaeontoast|6 years ago|reply
In theory I'd have insurance, however why put my family through years of seeing me suffer and become a person they might not recognize?
[+] [-] PlasticTank|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
Live life to the fullest, make peace with the world, and go out on your own terms. Far better than eking out a couple years of pain and suffering being slowly poisoned.
[+] [-] yoloswagins|6 years ago|reply
It's much nicer, and easier than making a huge mess for your family to clean up.
[+] [-] stordoff|6 years ago|reply
I'm quite aware there is probably a level of pain that may start my thinking in the opposition direction though, and no doubt different people will have different thoughts on and approaches to this.
[+] [-] JasonFruit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharaohgeek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|6 years ago|reply
0. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160224164357.h...
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
I took care of a relative following a mastectomy. Making sure she got adequately hydrated brought her fever down. I got two hours sleep her first night back from the hospital because I devotedly pushed fluids at every opportunity.
She coughed up phlegm after I made her get enough food and drink into her to drop her temperature a degree. She said I probably prevented post-operative pneumonia.
My late father had colon cancer in his late sixties. He lost a third of his body weight before it was diagnosed.
My parents were told to get their affairs in order. He wasn't supposed to live.
His surgery that was supposed to be two hours lasted six. The cancer was much more extensive than they expected, but it hadn't invaded other organs. They peeled it off the outside of them instead of cutting out parts of them.
He had a thirteen inch scar from sternum to pubic bone with a dent going around his belly button. My mother treated the scar with German Penaten cream and treated his skin with Penaten cream.
Her mother died from uterine cancer when my mother was in her teens. My mother was convinced that radiation treatments killed her mother. She always had some excuse why my dad couldn't make one of his radiation treatments every week.
He lived about another two decades.
The cancer clinic at Martin Army Hospital was impressed with the condition of dad's scar and asked what they were doing. My mother explained it was the Penaten cream. They added it to their regime.
After my father defied his sentence of death, the civilian cancer doctor that treated him interviewed my mother on tape for two hours and changed the practices of his clinic based on what she said. The doctor knew my mother is the person who kept my dad alive.
Their big thing was hydration. They calculated how much fluids he needed and they made sure he got enough every day. Caffeinated drinks and alcohol did not count.
When he was too sick to eat, she made him homemade milkshakes or slushies once or sometimes twice a day in place of meals. On not so bad days, I think she used milk, good quality ice cream and fresh fruit. On super bad days, she used ice, frozen fruit and fruit juice.
He was gaining so much weight during a time when most cancer patients are continuing to lose weight that his doctor yelled at her to slow it down. He had a long-standing heart condition and her doctor was afraid she was kill him by putting too much strain on his heart with the rapid weight gain while he was still undergoing treatment.
My mother wanted to be a doctor in her youth. She delivered babies in her teens. She never got to be a doctor, but she was always patching someone up as long as I can remember.
[+] [-] magic_beans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
personal sad story: uncle diagnosed with stage4 (mets) in late dec, got rounds of chemo 4 months after the diagnosis during which time the tumors didn't grow (based on the few bits we could read in his file). But after the 3rd round his health dropped to the floor, didn't last long after that. I believe the toll on his system was just too high. And I'm curious what are the mechanisms at play.
[+] [-] itissid|6 years ago|reply