This seems a bit extreme. Chemotherapy and its effects can be a very temporary thing, and your quality of life can go back to normal after you've finished your course and the cancer has gone into remission. Certainly there are aggressive cancers where you'd be fighting a painful battle of attrition, but there are many cancers where prognoses are good, and quality of life once treatment is done is more or less the same as before. A blanket personal ban on chemo is reckless and shortsighted.
The prohibition against amputation and sensory organ removal is a bit nuts too. You'd rather die than have someone remove one of your eyes or ears, or say a hand or arm or foot or leg? That is profoundly sad, and intensely insulting to anyone who has had to deal with that sort of thing and has nonetheless lived a full, rich life.
I get that many medical interventions do actually have a terrible, permanent effect on quality of life, but these seem like pretty extreme views that ignore reality.
I don't know what the commenter who posted about chemo and amputation actually thinks or believes. But I hesitate to call them "nuts" or to lecture them about how they have a wrong opinion. And I would not expand their personal opinion as a judgment on people who decide they can live with the effects of chemo, or amputation, or loss of an eye, because nothing in the original comment included a judgment on other people. Everyone has their own threshold for what they consider a life worth continuing, but we should not impose our own thresholds on other people, or judge them for making different choices.
For me the question goes beyond "Can I survive chemo (or amputation) and resume something like a normal life?" When you have to face cancer or loss of a limb or any illness or injury that threatens your life, or perceived quality of life, or dignity and autonomy, you necessarily have to think about what that means for your future. Until you get a diagnosis of (for example) cancer you don't know what it feels like, or how you will react, to the fact that no matter if you survive the treatment or not, you will always have that threat and reminder of your mortality in your conscious thoughts. You think about how you might not get so lucky the next time, how much your treatments might cost, what your illness might put your loved ones through, how far you will go to keep yourself alive even when it imposes costs and obligations on other people. And you think that maybe other people will have to make hard decisions about your future if you can't. A cancer diagnosis doesn't just affect me, in other words. If I lost a leg or arm that would impose burdens on my wife and family, affect my ability to make a living. Those thoughts more than the medical condition itself lead people to arrive at opinions such as the original commenter expressed.
Having faced my own mortality already I know I think more about how my own end of life scenarios affect other people more than how they will affect me. I worry that I will suffer a stroke, or slip into dementia, before I can pull my own plug, leaving people I care deeply about with that awful obligation, and the burden of caring for me rather than living their own life. And it's that thought, not the fear of disease or dying, that leads me to my own ideas about how much I might endure, because I won't endure it alone or without cost to others.
The prohibition against amputation and sensory organ removal is a bit nuts too. You'd rather die than have someone remove one of your eyes or ears, or say a hand or arm or foot or leg? That is profoundly sad, and intensely insulting to anyone who has had to deal with that sort of thing and has nonetheless lived a full, rich life.
I get that many medical interventions do actually have a terrible, permanent effect on quality of life, but these seem like pretty extreme views that ignore reality.