The Big ‘C’

Tweet

I remember a few decades ago, ‘cancer’ was a dreaded word, so terrible that people were afraid to speak it out loud. It would be murmured in corners when discussing a poorly neighbour. Often the patients themselves were not told the awful truth. It was a sentence of certain death. But since then the situation has changed a lot. Now people are not afraid to tell their friends they have cancer, and many well-known faces are telling their cancer stories in the papers and on social media. There are very many new treatments which have also greatly improved patient outcomes and survival. And yet… My personal experience is not so positive. The first person I knew in my adult life who contracted cancer was someone from my friendship group at university. He had liver cancer and died in his early thirties. I thought he was just very unlucky. Then my elderly friend had bladder cancer and died. Of course she was in her 80s so she had to die of something…. Then a cousin, recently retired, was in the Middle East volunteering for a charity when he started feeling a bit strange. He was advised to come home and within three months he was dead from multiple myeloma. Then my friend’s mother, a high-flying public figure, retired to the country and then died just a couple of months later from a particularly aggressive and painful form of stomach cancer. Now another friend, who celebrated her 50th birthday in Paris just before lockdown last year, has terminal breast cancer with a prognosis of a couple of years. And even my builder who is doing renovation work for me, has a younger brother (who coincidentally was in my primary school class) with cancer in his neck, and he is about to go to a hospice for his final days. And both of these latter two are mere shadows of their former selves, not because of the cancer but as a result of the aggressive treatment. They received their diagnoses when they were fit and apparently healthy. They went to hospital for chemotherapy and radiotherapy and surgery, and came out as stooped emaciated remnants of themselves, and still they are going to die soon. Is any of the treatment really worth it? For my friend with breast cancer for example; she appeared and felt healthy before she found a lump. But perhaps she would have been dead within the year without treatment. Now, after a year of treatment, she can barely leave the house, she has to have help at home, her body has been mutilated and she is transformed into a hunched old lady shuffling about. She will hopefully live an extra two years, but she has had to endure a year mostly spent in bed feeling exhausted and nauseous. And of course the treatment has cost the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds. I would be interested to read the case reports of these two patients to see whether their treatments were considered ‘successful’ because they continued to exist for a few extra months. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.