The F*** Cancer Thread

I don't blame you for your anger at the thought of the desperate being ripped off. I feel much the same way. The thought of anyone I met while I was being treated being ripped off because they are hoping to stay alive makes my blood boil. There's no desperation as deep or as true as that of someone begging to live for just one more day (except perhaps that of a parent begging the same for their child). People that prey on such (if they can rightly be called people) should be ruthlessly shut down wherever they can be found.

That having been said, thank you for the apology.

Edit -

I did say I wasn't speaking towards the efficacy of the items on the list. I was just listing them off. If I came across as suggesting that they were efficacious that was my error. Please allow me to correct myself - I am in no way suggesting that they are effective, I am simply listing off what my fellow inmates made me aware of.

One of my closest friends had a cancer scare about 1.5 years ago. I never thought about not having this person in my life till she told me she had cancer. It fundamentally rocked my world. I was lucky and she pulled threw it but I feel for you. My thoughts and prayers go out to you.

Fuck cancer. I am sorry to hear about the news your friends dad received. Him and his family have my deepest sympathies.

My mother is currently fighting her 3rd bout of breast cancer. Stage 4 metastatic. The main tumor was removed from the breast, but the breast cancer cells were also found in her lung. She is allergic to chemo now, so they are using other treatments.

She, like most parents, tries to hide information from us to prevent us from worrying. Initially they told her she had less than three years. Now they are telling her she has at least 10. Which is great news. The tumor has gone from being a little larger than a golf ball to less than 1cm x 1.5cm. We are all hopeful and her specialist has been amazing.

So once again, my sympathies for anybody who has had cancer or has lost loved ones to it.

My mother died of billiary cancer at 53. Ugly, ugly business as you guys all know.

One thing that's under-discussed when it comes to terminal illness is the option to go out on your own terms. Particularly in America where we have access to every treatment ever devised, there is a tendency to fight to the bitter end at all costs. This often results in people spending fabulous amounts of money on treatments that do little more than make the patient's remaining life a walking hell. In retrospect, in the case of my mother, both she and the rest of the family could have had a drastically improved quality of life by ceasing to pursue hopeless curative treatments and instead trying to achieve comfort. While this is a very hard choice to make, it should be considered that a shorter, more pleasant remaining life might be preferable to a longer, dismal one. (Obviously this choice needs to be made by the individual patients and families.)

While it's a really uncomfortable subject to talk about, managing end-of-life situations is an important part of health care and one for which there is a LOT of room for improvement.

Edit: Fuck cancer. Fuck it right in the ear.

This title should be edited to "FUCK CANCER" because cancer doesn't deserve anything less than harsh, unfiltered 100% pure hatred.

Captain Suave_sl said:

My mother died of billiary cancer at 53. Ugly, ugly business as you guys all know.

One thing that's under-discussed when it comes to terminal illness is the option to go out on your own terms. Particularly in America where we have access to every treatment ever devised, there is a tendency to fight to the bitter end at all costs. This often results in people spending fabulous amounts of money on treatments that do little more than make the patient's remaining life a walking hell. In retrospect, in the case of my mother, both she and the rest of the family could have had a drastically improved quality of life by ceasing to pursue hopeless curative treatments and instead trying to achieve comfort. While this is a very hard choice to make, it should be considered that a shorter, more pleasant remaining life might be preferable to a longer, dismal one. (Obviously this choice needs to be made by the individual patients and families.)

While it's a really uncomfortable subject to talk about, managing end-of-life situations is an important part of health care and one for which there is a LOT of room for improvement.

Edit: Fuck cancer. Fuck it right in the ear.

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Terry Pratchett recently did a documentary about the right to die comfortably and on your own terms after he was diagnosed with alzheimers, definitely worth a watch, even if it is depressing to think about such an awesome author kicking it

Relevant

Well this thread officially jinxed me.... Was just thinking to myself how fortunate I am the other day to have not lost one close friend or relative yet, and then my dad gets taken to the ER, and it turns out he has Liver Cancer and Cirrhosis. He was bleeding internally at a very heavy rate and apparently had 2.9 pints of blood in his body. The doctor said he's never seen anyone with that low of blood survive. They immediately gave him several transfusions and stopped the bleeding, so he's doing a lot better for now. I guess it's not too shocking given how much alcohol he drinks and how long he's been doing it, but still sucks. Hopefully he will have a few more years with minimal pain. At least he's made it a decent amount of time. He will be 61 in February.

My mom passed a year ago after a seven year fight with Ovarian Cancer. We were lucky as my stepdad is a neurosurgeon, hence she was able to get the best treatment and he was able to afford it. How people manage to live with this for years without some sort of financial support system is beyond me. I think nothing epitomizes the massive fail that is the US health care system more than long term Cancer.

In any case, seven years of on again off again chemo, remission, recurrence-- your life becomes one that is always tinged with anxiety. What is amazing is how sad I always felt seeing her in pain and struggling, yet from the day she was diagnosed she became the happiest person alive. It's like knowing you have a limited time actually frees you somehow..

The worst part is the final few weeks when they become delusional and hallucinate, and you are basically waiting at their side for them to die. Nothing in my life has shred me emotionally as much as watching each labored breath and wondering if it was her last. Then when it finally does come, it is not like it is depicted in some TV show or movie, where they just stop breathing and peacefully die.. The last few minutes of life was the most disturbing and downright frightening experience I have ever witnessed. What I saw will forever be burnt into my brain and will stay with me until the day I die, and since then I have become a firm believer in Euthanasia.

Cancer robs you of energy, your money, your dignity, and ensures that you suffer until the very end. Yeah, fuck Cancer.

Worked at the busiest coffeehouse in New Orleans for a few years. Peyton and Eli Manning's mother came in every weekend to hold court with the other uptown housewives. Anyway, one of my favorite customers was a woman who had cancer. I can't remember the details, but she had it for something like 20 years. And it was pretty bad that whole time. Bone cancer I know, but spread everywhere. She would go get chemo/radiation, then things would be calm for a while, then it would pop up again, get another round of treatment, rinse repeat. She made it 20 years like that. One of my nicest customers, she would sometimes look thin and rough, but never failed to have a genuine smile on her face and ask me about my day. Brought her son in to meet me, the whole nine yards. I think about her often, but this was 10 years ago now, and she was fairly skeletal the last time I saw her.

Before that I installed ADSL for bellsouth.net. I went on a repair call to a house uptown. Beautiful house, beautiful wife, and two small children. I'm starting my troubleshooting, just making small talk, when she just starts crying. She tells me she has skin cancer that has metastasized (this is what killed my mother). She said she was vigilant about going to the doctor, she had fair skin and would go in to see a dermatologist at the slightest sign of something. She said they missed it. The pathology on the biopsy came back negative, but it was cancer. She told me that the problem was that they removed the entire area, so that made something called 'dermatic mapping' (probably butchered that, been a long time) impossible? She broke down and I held her in my arms while she sobbed, her kids downstairs. I'm just a stranger in her house fixing her internet. It was tragic. She did everything right and it still got her at a young age.

The worst part of that story is that I shared with her that my mother died of melanoma, and as I was leaving, she had her children beside her, and told them right there that my mom had what she has and didn't make it. It was awful. I don't think ill of her though for that. It was wrong, but people do stuff when they are in the grip of grief/anguish.

I never saw her again, but I know how deadly melanoma is. Hope she made it.

Lost my beautiful wife to cancer. Will be coming up 3 years in January.

Fuck cancer indeed.

BubbySoup_sl said:

Lost my beautiful wife to cancer. Will be coming up 3 years in January.

Fuck cancer indeed.

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That sucks dude. Why couldn't you have lost an ugly wife to cancer instead?

Orcus_sl said:

Cancer got my mother in 1994. She didn't make it to 50. Fuck cancer. Sorry about the bad news man.

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Took my grandmother from me, shit has to be the saddest fucking thing to watch.. a loved one fight fucking cancer, keep your head up bro.

Cancer can take anyone, at any age, at any time.

My girlfriend that I dated our senior year in highschool and then we went to college together died from ovarian cancer when she was 23. She had been complaining of stomach pains for about a year, we were Juniors in college when it started. Doctors chalked it up to nerves, or possibly ulcers. Her family were self-employed farmers so they had no health insurance, so she never wanted to push the issue and make them pay for an expensive MRI, or whatever they hell test they would have needed to actually discover what was wrong. We had been together for almost 5 years, we were just waiting to finish school to get married, so I knew her very well and I knew something wasn't right, but I trusted the doctors who kept telling her it was probably just ulcers from the stress of college. Finally during Christmas break of our senior year, she had a fit of so much pain that she passed out and collapsed. Ambulance took her to the hospital, they finally ran the appropriate tests and discovered she had ovarian cancer, and had for quite a while. It was too advanced to even have hope of operating. This was late December, she was dead by April. She was so upset that she was missing her final semester of college that once her professors heard of her situation and how dire it was, they passed her through all of her last semester classes(even though she hadn't attended a single day, but was signed up for them before she went into the hospital in December) and they got the University to issue her a diploma about 2-3 weeks before she died. She was so happy to get it.

Fucked me up for a long time, I didn't date for years. I'm 33 now and I finally just got married this year and we have a baby on the way, but it still chokes me up to the point of tears to even type the story, I still can't really talk about it at all to friends, family, or my wife. They all know what happened.

Cancer is fucked

(This is also why I post a little passionately in the threads on this site about things like medical insurance, shit's ridiculously important for reasons you can't generally fathom at the time, but you'll be glad it's there when you do need it)

I agree. Not just fuck it, though. Fuck it, then disembowelit while still alive, and use its intestines as bondage to fuck it again as it dies. I have seen it take too many people I loved, especially my Dad in September 2000, when he was only 60.

I hate it with the fire of a thousand burnng suns.

So some really awesome news!

A friend of my girlfriend and mine was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 18. "Died" a couple times on the table during the whole process of treatment and recovery, but got out of it. 1.5 years later, after he moved away from Texas to Maine with his new-ish girlfriend, he started having complications again. This was about 3 months ago.

He was seen in Boston, confirmed that he had had a heart attack, and an irregular heart pattern and that the leukemia had returned inside of his heart and kidneys. He had to come back to Texas to see his doctor, and was admitted to the oncology ward.

After undergoing another round of chemo, and a lot of trips to the ICU due to massive heart problems, they were able to drain a liter of fluid from around his heart and he was announced cancer free once again yesterday!

FUCK YOU CANCER!

My father-in-law passed away early this morning due to complications from cancer (Cancer went into remission with the last dose of chemo last week, but he got an infection and his lungs were severely damaged due to being weak from the chemo)...I really admired him. Guy literally came from nothing, grew up in the poorest area of one of the poorest states (Kentucky), on a defunct coal mine. He joined the army at 17 just to get away from the poverty, was a chopper medic in Vietnam and then became a doctor after the war (He went all the way from enlisted up to Lt. Colonel in his 20 year career). After he retired from the army he went to work in the private field as an oil rig doctor off the coast of Africa in the Indian ocean. Guy just had huge balls--he actually helped fight off a group of pirates when his rig came under attack while they were moving it to a new location (I think the legend is he used a flare gun, no seriously..the rig workers told us about it). I remember my wife freaking out that day, luckily a navy ship came and chased them off..Survivedallthat and was brought down by this shit like 3 years after he retired.

Really sucks, he was the one who helped me through my brother's death from brain cancer 8 years ago (Was the only doctor who gave me straight answers and helped me study up on it, so I could help my brother.)

Fuck cancer