Can you elaborate what makes cancer any more frightening than any other things that may get us? Is it the threat of pain? As long as we are mortal our journey is a finite one anyway.
I guess it's more frightening because we're more likely to develop cancer than most other diseases, it occurs for the most part purely randomly and chances are high that it leads to a slow and painful death. Cancers evolve to resist drugs and radiation, and due to the nature of evolution, you are unable to tell if and when it happens. As I wrote under another article, cancer is a fundamental dread of all higher multicellular life. Is that comforting? Maybe on a bigger perspective. What makes it bad for humans is that they know what's happening.
My father died of liver cancer. A piece of me died in those weeks of his misery, and pain right up to his horrid death.
My father was not a kind man. He was petty, selfish person, but I still would have done anything for him.
Looking back, he was under medicated while in Palliative Care. He was at home, but that shouldn't be an issue? No one in the family could figure out why he wasen't given more medication. He saw a Hospice Doctor once, I believe, and a couple of nurses dropped by.
Getting him pain meds, and benzodiazepines was a battle. It's such a stressful situation, and getting meds should be difficult?
He never seemed to have enough. I look back, and don't know what the problem was with the lack of strong medication. Maybe the doctors didn't want too much around? I don't know?
They should alleviated his pain better though.
I understand no cures, but alleviate the misery with drugs. We do have drugs?
There were times, I felt like, if I knew where to buy it; I would have bought him heroin.
I accept death. We can make patients comfortable when they are dying with medication? Maybe we were the the family that wasen't vocal enough? I don't know, but in my dads death; Hospice did a terrible job.
Hospice has a lot of money. I was surprised, because I heard they were a good organization.
(I didn't want to read this post. I had a feeling it was Peiter. I don't know the man, but truely admire his courage.)
There might be some screwy regulations that if you drug a person too much - no matter how terminally ill they are or how in pain - you are doing a criminal offense. Also, there is this strange worship of suffering in some circles - how just bearing ones load is somehow more noble than being blissfully stoned.
Not a medical professional, though.
I think parts of me died for both of my parents death. All the strength.
My mother spent her last month as psychiatric patient at an alcoholics ward, and only after she had died autopsy discovered she had pancreatic cancer. She was mostly incoherent, frightened and delusional. They said she screamed through the nights. Despite her history I cannot even after years stop wondering was that really the correct place to tend to her-and why did her mental condition lapse so thoroughly before the end. Death and lack of dignity sucks.
If you have lost relatives to cancer, it means it runs in the family. That, I suppose, makes it worse than any other disease, i.e., the threat becomes more real.
I think the genetic component of cancer depends very much on the kind of cancer one has. Lots of other conditions have a strong genetic component - poor cardiovascular health, depression, schizophrenia, alzheimer's, strong disposition towards substance abuse, etc. I would not call it "worse" than for example the genetic likelihood of 80% of developing alzheimers at an early age (which luckily I don't personally have).
Perhaps this is a very personal view - but as I've lost relatives to all sorts of maladies including cancer I find it really hard to see cancer as the absolutely worst bogeyman in the room. That's not to say it's not bad.
