To Treat Or To Surrender

One of my longest term E mail friends (who I have been writing to since 1998) just wrote that her father had died. He had been sick with a serious cancer for more than a year, and I knew his prognosis would lead to an early death. But she fought the disease with him for all that time, trying nearly every treatment in hospitals with doctors and non standard treatment venues with non certified physicians, both standard and herbal. I never fully understood it all when she wrote to me about them. And I often asked myself, "Why does one pursue such expensive and painful treatments when they have such a slight chance of even extending a dying person's even a few more months?"

The business of cancer treatment is a curious one, built on false hopes and promises. There are a multitude of super expensive drugs that dying patients rush to pay for. But almost all of them do no more than ensure the patient an even shorter life or more painful death (from the treatments themselves). Often the most successful medicines extend a life for a few months, ensuring the patient dies with a mountain of debt and no no inheritance to pass to loved ones. But hope does spring eternal in many. Perhaps human nature more often compels one to fight even when odds tell the futility and pain of the fight.

Since I have not been afflicted with a terminal cancer, I can not state with surety that I would do otherwise and accept death. but my experience with terminal cancers in my own family has instructed me it is most often foolish to "take the treatment" and that exiting without a fight my be more comforting to the mind and the body than tortuous pseudo treatments. But I think that if I were afflicted would not fight against large odds.

Sometimes the patient has no option and has the treatment or no treatment question answered for him or her. A young dying parent for instance, feels obliged to fight in order to be with his or her child. And then some of us are deluded when faced with death into denying our own mortality. They fight because they never accept death from a cancer as a real possibility. This age of almost medical miracles in which medicine can do some things, but far too few to save us from the disease, has also given us the great dilemma of trying to determine when to fight and when to surrender, when to accept and when to deny. Sigh... for the mind the treatment really can be more deadly than the affliction.