The Big C - A Plea for a New Future

My cousin Kelly, passed away this week after a short bat­tle with can­cer. She was in Hos­pice for the last month. Who­ever founded that blessed orga­ni­za­tion deserves a Pulitzer Prize. Hos­pice has allowed peo­ple the free­dom to die rel­a­tively painfree, in the dig­nity of a peace­ful set­ting, or their own home, rather than the imper­sonal, insti­tu­tional ambi­ence of a hospital.

I real­ize Hos­pice is not for every­one, but in my expe­ri­ence, it’s an hon­or­able recog­ni­tion of the need that dying can be a highly per­sonal process for the ter­mi­nally ill. Hos­pice allows friends and fam­ily to be together in a famil­iar, relaxed, gen­tler, envi­ron­ment while pro­vid­ing pain man­age­ment and pal­lia­tive care.

Kelly’s ill­ness and death has been a dev­as­tat­ing blow to so many of us who admire and love her. I’ve walked this path many times before with other loved ones; help­lessly stand­ing by as my grand­mother, mother, sev­eral aunts, a respected men­tor, friends, and my beloved spouse, were stricken by this mon­strous dis­ease. In every case they all were hope­ful and pos­i­tive, will­ing to do what­ever it took to beat their can­cer. They all had so much life yet to expe­ri­ence and a pos­i­tive atti­tude was already a part of their DNA.

Many in the med­ical com­mu­nity tout this as being a require­ment for heal­ing. It’s not nearly enough. It’s almost an insult to those who fight so hard to turn their diag­no­sis into a suc­cess story. If pos­i­tive atti­tudes were even a small part of the arse­nal in bat­tling can­cer, both my cousin and spouse would be here right now.

This is an insid­i­ous, pow­er­ful dis­ease, bor­der­ing on satanic. As a soci­ety, we have not done nearly enough to elim­i­nate it. My frus­tra­tion over the years has often con­sumed me. I’ve donated my time, my dol­lars and enough prayers to lay a direct path to the gates of heaven. The course of treat­ment used on my husband’s colon can­cer, was iden­ti­cal to the approach, 30 years prior, in treat­ing my grand­mother. The out­come, in both cases, ren­dered the same results; death within 18 months.

The sug­gested regime turned healthy bod­ies into poi­soned, sickly ones unable to take in nour­ish­ment or func­tion, as our answer to mod­ern med­i­cine, destroyed their immune sys­tems more rapidly than the can­cer invad­ing sur­round­ing organs. Radi­a­tion killed tumors, as well as healthy tis­sue and dragged my loved ones into an unimag­in­able bone crush­ing weari­ness. The chem­i­cals injected into their bod­ies to kill the enemy cells, wiped every good one out as well, unlock­ing the doors and open­ing them wide to fur­ther inva­sion by rapa­cious, mul­ti­ply­ing bad cells.

I think the meth­ods of treat­ment today are as bar­baric and non­sen­si­cal as using leeches or the blood let­ting per­formed a cen­tury ago. I don’t believe it’s the best we can do. Why aren’t we encour­ag­ing a more holis­tic approach as well: med­i­ta­tion, mas­sage and nutri­tional ther­a­pies? We can com­mu­ni­cate through a vari­ety of amaz­ing media around the world … within seconds!

We can grow a human being in a test tube with a sin­gle egg and sperm. We can trans­late a for­eign lan­guage using the appro­pri­ate appli­ca­tion, with a swipe of a smart phone. Why can’t we fig­ure out why a micro­scopic cell turns muti­nous and coerces it’s fel­low cell­mates to over­take our good health?

Can we use some of the great minds blos­som­ing in the lab­o­ra­to­ries of MIT and Johns Hop­kins as well as other sci­en­tific insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing to focus directed atten­tion to the mys­ter­ies of can­cer? Isn’t this much more impor­tant than hav­ing the abil­ity to use our smart phone to iden­tify the best deal in the area, or the tech­nol­ogy to inter­ac­tively engage in?

Becky Mahoney writes from the heart at http://www.examiningmyunexaminedlife.blogspot.com.

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Oct 18 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.