Second Guessing

What if the doctors are wrong and my cancer could be cured? You can find lots of cases of people who were told they had no chance, but fought, and won. Maybe I should be killing myself with chemo in the hopes of being one of them, rather than working and traveling. 

But what if you fight, and lose? Chemo is terrible and so what if you decide that you believe the doctors are wrong, spend months in a chemo-induced haze, only to have the doctors proved right, and so you’ve transformed your remaining good time into terrible time and now there’s no good time left? Or maybe worse, what if it works? You’ve sacrificed your entire life trying to “live” longer, and now here you are, living, but without any of the things necessary to move forward and make life worth living. 

But what if one of the promised miracle cures comes to pass? Maybe we’re just months away from an immunotherapy trial or some new drug that identifies the magic bullet for colon cancer. Doesn’t it make sense to fight for as much time as possible in the hopes that the “curing cancer without chemo” lottery ticket pays off? 

Maybe, but they’ve been promising cures for diabetes for decades. The doctors were talking about islet replacement and other such things back when you were first diagnosed nearly thirty years ago. Thirty years on and the cure is still “right around the corner,” though with lab grown tissue rather than islet replacement. Do you really want to buy into that again? Really?  

Fine. How ‘bout alternative medicine? Instead of scoffing, maybe you should embrace harmonic chanting, or fruit smoothies, or hot baths, or weed, or out of body experiences, or whatever weirdness you can find online, and give it a shot. How bad could it be? And besides, you don’t see a lot of natives, ancients, etc., dying of cancer, do you? 

Well, no, but that might’ve been because they all died at forty, long before cancer had a chance to materialize. I just have a really hard time believing in something that has nothing more than anecdote to document its effectiveness. As Tim Minchin puts it, “Alternative medicine that’s been proven to work is called ‘medicine.’” 

But you don’t want to wind up like your friend, a skeletal presence sitting in a chair, barely able to move and waiting for the end to come, do you? 

Of course not, but is there really an option? Sure, you can make the run to Oregon and opt for “death with dignity,” but it’s still death. And there’s certainly some reason to believe that my friend's current condition is as much a result of the chemo as of the cancer. I don’t recall Mum looking that bad. So maybe it’s the fighting that causes the anguish, not the cancer. 

Maybe, but is that a gamble you really want to take? It's a problem. There must be a solution. Every problem has a solution. There must be something you can do. 

What? What should I do? There doesn’t seem to be any right answer, at least none that I can find. Ask six people what the right thing to do is and you’ll get six different answers, probably most of them having more to do with the person your asking’s own issues with sickness and death than it does what you’re specifically facing. You may as well just post your options on the wall throw a dart. 

Besides, we’ve all got to die sometime. It’s not like there’s an option out there that will negate that tiny little truth. The "problem" isn't dying. We're all going to die. The problem is accepting that we're going to die -- some of us sooner than others.

Fine. There’s no right answer. There's no way to know what to do. But you've got to do something!

Imagine you're standing on a very small island all by yourself and a giant wave is rushing toward you. What can you do? The best -- perhaps the only -- option is to just go with the flow. What will be will be.

Fine. We'll "go with the flow." 

But I’m scared. Aren’t you scared? 

I'm terrified…