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So, I go to read your blog, and I find out that all I need to do is
send you a fucking mylar balloon and you'll be automatically cancer free!
Why were you holding out on us? Of course, with the recession and all, there's no way I'm pulling money out of the mattress for said balloon, so you'd better hope that a latex one without helium does something for you. Furthermore, I read the cancer manual, and you are not at all behaving as you should. The manual says that when you get cancer you must be heroic and allow others to benefit from your noble suffering. Where the hell is my benefit I ask? From your blog, it seems like this cancer thing is all about YOU! WTF? |
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The lungs are made of lobes, two in the left lung and three in the right
lung (the left lung is smaller because the heart is on the left side).
Each lobe operates independently, and a single lobe can be surgically
removed without interfering with the functioning of any of the other
lobes, or with your overall health and functioning. Why not surgically
remove the lobe in which the lung lesion is living? Then you could
stop the chemotherapy.
(My friend is a cancer survivor herself, and really doesn't like chemotherapy). |
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"The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they've
reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"
"Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?" Trillian frowned. "What do you mean, offense?" "I see." Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless. |
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Once again I find myself staging an intervention to keep you in line.
You are not permitted to post about your treatment of the income-challenged in the way that you are. I am not impressed that they apologize to you. Anyone can play the lunatic and get an apology. Now if they are giving YOU money, then I'll be impressed. So get to work on your presentation & stop making excuses. And once again, it seems you get the good drugs and I get crap. How the hell are you getting the doctors to prescribe such high levels of Fukitall? I try to get a small prescription, but all they want to give me is Sarcasma. I did literally laugh out loud at the copay story, but I think you need to up the ante. Next visit come in with the $100 bill and a briefcase. When she asks if you have anything else, say that in fact you do, reach into the front pocket of the briefcase and pull out a roll of pennies, followed by a second roll and a third. I don't think you'll actually need all 40 rolls :) And last but not least, I am once again astonished at your foresight. You had pretty much demanded your rectum be returned to you and we all took it as the rantings of your always delusional mind. Here I find it preserved in amber for nefarious "medical purposes". Is it too late to have PETA break into the labs and free it for you? |
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You said:
"When I related the incident to some of my friends, they remonstrated with me, saying that I could be killed. My response was 'So you don't want me to be killed in a road-rage incident, but instead you want me to survive long enough to be killed by metastatic rectal cancer. Because those are my choices.' They didn't have much of a reply. " I do. "Think of the paperwork!" If you die of metastatic rectal cancer, they will generate only 1 piece of paper--your death certificate. If you die of a road rage incident--it will generate tons of paper, probably in triplicate, and take YEARS to clear up in terms of time and man power. Which is more efficient? Which is kinder to the environment? |
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You do realize that you're the only one they make fill out the paperwork
each time, don't you? Something about that abundance of character, I spose.
Also, when you get stuck someplace late at night (take that anyway you want), there are lots of us you can call. We won't do anything, of course, but think of the annoyance factor! |
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Most people want to fend off death no matter the cost. More than $40
billion is spent worldwide each year on cancer drugs. In the United
States, they constitute the second-largest category of pharmaceutical
sales, after heart drugs, and are growing twice as fast as the rest
of the market. The bulk of this spending goes to chemotherapy, which
is used in a variety of ways and has proven effective on some cancers,
including leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and testicular cancer,
especially if these cancers are detected early.
But in most other cases, chemotherapy is remarkably ineffective. An exhaustive analysis of cancer treatment in the United States and Australia showed that the five-year survival rate for all patients was about 63 percent but that chemotherapy contributed barely 2 percent to this result. There is a long list of cancers for which chemotherapy had zero discernible effect, including multiple myeloma, soft-tissue sarcoma, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the pancreas, uterus, prostate, bladder, and kidney. Consider lung cancer, by far the most prevalent fatal cancer, killing more than 150,000 people a year in the United States. A typical chemotherapy regime for non-small-cell lung cancer costs more than $40,000 but helps extend a patient's life by an average of just two months. Thomas J. Smith, a highly regarded oncology researcher and clinician at Virginia Commonwealth University, examined a promising new chemotherapy treatment for metastasized breast cancer and found that each additional year of healthy life gained from it costs $360,000--if such a gain could actually be had. Unfortunately, it couldn't: the new treatment extended a patient's life by less than two months. Costs like these put a tremendous strain on the entire health-care system. Smith points out that cancer patients make up 20 percent of Medicare cases but consume 40 percent of the Medicare drug budget. Some oncologists argue that the benefits of chemotherapy aren't necessarily captured in the mortality data, and that while chemotherapy may not help nine out of ten patients, it may do wonders for the tenth. Still, considering its expense, its frequent lack of efficacy, and its toxicity--nearly 30 percent of the lung cancer patients on one protocol stopped treatment rather than live with its brutal side effects--why is chemotherapy so widely administered? The profit motive is certainly a factor. Doctors are, after all, human beings who respond to incentives. Oncologists are among the highest-paid doctors, their salaries increasing faster than any other specialists', and they typically derive more than half of their income from selling and administering chemotherapy drugs. Chemotherapy can also help oncologists inflate their survival-rate data. It may not seem all that valuable to give a late-stage victim of lung cancer an extra two months to live, but perhaps the patient was only expected to live four months anyway. On paper, this will look like an impressive feat: the doctor extended the patient's remaining life by 50 percent. Tom Smith doesn't discount either of these reasons, but he provides two more. It is tempting, he says, for oncologists to overstate--or perhaps over-believe in--the efficacy of chemotherapy. "If your slogan is 'We're winning the war on cancer,' that gets you press and charitable donations and money from Congress," he says. "If your slogan is 'We're still getting our butts kicked by cancer but not as bad as we used to,' thats a different sell. The reality is that for most people with solid tumors--brain, breast, prostate, lung--we aren't getting our butts kicked as badly, but we haven't made much progress." There's also the fact that oncologists are, once again, human beings who have to tell other human beings they are dying and that, sadly, there isn't much to be done about it. "Doctors like me find it incredibly hard to tell people the very bad news," Smith says, "and how ineffective our medicines sometimes are." If this task is so hard for doctors, surely it must also be hard for the politicians and insurance executives who subsidize the widespread use of chemotherapy. Despite the mountain of negative evidence, chemotherapy seems to afford cancer patients their last, best hope to nurse what Smith calls "the deep and abiding desire not to be dead." Still, it is easy to envision a point in the future, perhaps fifty years from now, when we collectively look back at the early twenty-first century's cutting-edge cancer treatments and say: We were giving our patients what? |
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You are like the poster child for the theme from Friends:
"Not your day, your week, your month, or even your year."
Somewhere there's a voodoo doll absently tossed into a drawer full of icepicks. That, or you really need to look into past-life therapy and figure out which gods you pissed off. |
| I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. |
