Friday, August 21, 2009
DON'T COUNT ME OUT
Yet. But I gotta tell you as I look around I don't want any of those "cures" that they have for cancer or anything else.
I know. That is a sweeping statement. But 6 months to get my affairs in order and say my goodbyes are a lot more preferable than two or three years of radiation, chemotherapy, tubes and bags and all the rest.
I like the new approaches to "palliative care". Here is a long article in the NYTimes about a program at Montefiore Medical Center.
At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort
It is long on stuff about training docs to be better at delivering bad news but it has a lot of meat around the issue of quality of life choices and help from the docs with that.
My experience is with people who get talked into heroic measures by the surgeons who will cut and dice as well as the radiologists, oncologists and the rest who have new science to peddle and to use particularly on old people.
I bet, incidentally, that this is where some of that "death panel" stuff comes from.
I am all for it.
I am not afraid of dying as much as suffering and protracted "procedures" to ward off the inevitable.
Now the trick is knowing whether what they want you to do has a hight probablity of success. And there, I am on my own with the help of my friends. Unless I have a good doc to talk to like ours. Or one of these folks who are putting some perspective on life extension.
I did make that choice once and I did it willingly knowing that there was an extremely high probability of recovery. 99%. The radiation for my prostate cancer was arduous for a 60 year old man. Now? It would be even harder and that was a relatively benign treatment. In a fairly good place in the body to have that kind of thing done if you have to have it done.
I had a consultant, a hired old surgeon. I had my primary care doc. I had other people who had been through it. I would do no less due diligence today.
I hope my kids are reading this. If I get one of those things where I am speechless then you know which way I want the wind to blow. You won't need a weatherman. You got it right here.
