I just lost my Aunt. Her last years were a battle, but it often felt like a proxy war between Medicine and Mutation using her body as the battleground. First they sent in advisors, then they attempted regime change, then there were truce talks, then the conflict reignited. At the end she told the doctors to fuck off with their knives and needles so she could melt slowly into a hospice bed, robbed of her beauty, dignity, and life.
fuck cancer.
i hear what you are saying, and i will try to phrase it differently, but i do see it as a war. i am a smoker. i often work with carcinogenic chemicals. i see cancer as an inevitability, and when it shows up, i plan to either do nothing therapeutic (chemo, removal) and just go on a no holds barred adventure around the world to look at stuff i've only read about OR donate my body to some team of researchers who need a living model to test their ideas on. this is just my thinking currently; it may change. i have no children, few possessions, and few ties outside of family.
So for me, i do see it as a war that i will inevitably become a part of.
> when it shows up, i plan to either do nothing therapeutic (chemo, removal)
> donate my body to some team of researchers who need a living model to test their ideas on.
I have a cousin who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and, like everyone, have lost various other relatives and friends to cancer over the years.
One thing which is very clear from their experience is that all cancer treatment is experimentation on living people, with a hope that some combination of treatments will bring a cure. For some people there is a brief success (reduced tumor size, sometimes to undetectable levels) but, outside of some cancers which are very treatable, this is normally a brief pause.
Treatments people receive today are because of the experiences of people in the past which showed a good response and this is fed into developing and fine-tuning what is done today. The hope is this experimentation will mean more success in future and longer lives with better quality.
There are lots of anger filled comments (understandably so) here. The reality is you are best to receive the experimentation early on when it can bring benefits, but to also recognize it's not always going to benefit you for long and the benefit may go to someone a few years from now who have a better treatment and better results because of your experiences.
I think that's really the only positive thing you can take from the experience.
If you ever do get diagnosed, the bucket list thing is good. That's what I'm doing with my cousin while she has time. There is only a brief interval to tick that off; take it before it's too late.
Both my parents had cancer. Lung cancer for my father (he was a smoker for most of his adult life). He had a couple of surgeries and radiation and chemo and it bought him probably 10 years at the expense of a few intervals of discomfort. I think that's probably worth it, but it's hard to know ahead of time how things will turn out. The cancer eventually returned, and given his age and overall health at the time there was nothing more to be done.
Mother had breast cancer, caught early, and fully cured with lumpectomy and some radiation (no recurrence before her death due to unrelated causes).
Other forms of cancer are less treatable. It all depends on type and how early it's detected. I don't see much point in making any kind of hard-and-fast decisions ahead of time. When the time comes, look at the facts, get some good medical advice, and then decide what you want to do.
That all makes sense. I guess, in my head, when i say research i am thinking: wire the fuck out of my body. plant sensors, take biopsies, whatever. Metaphorically, i am a craft (space or flight) that is definitely going to crash, so instead of trying to fix it, let's get some hardcore telemetry. that may seem strange, but i believe data is the key to, well, everything. and i want to help my Family, which is every human being, and in my mind good data is the best way to do that.
fuck cancer.
i hear what you are saying, and i will try to phrase it differently, but i do see it as a war. i am a smoker. i often work with carcinogenic chemicals. i see cancer as an inevitability, and when it shows up, i plan to either do nothing therapeutic (chemo, removal) and just go on a no holds barred adventure around the world to look at stuff i've only read about OR donate my body to some team of researchers who need a living model to test their ideas on. this is just my thinking currently; it may change. i have no children, few possessions, and few ties outside of family.
So for me, i do see it as a war that i will inevitably become a part of.
fuck fucking cancer.