Post: #26

Somehow I overlooked your latest post when I wrote my last one.

And it is too late to edit mine now.

Anyway - thanks for sharing, MidWest. That is some frightening shit.

Good luck to you!

Post: #27

(01-11-2015 06:12 PM)MidWest Wrote:  

(01-11-2015 04:30 PM)Plato Wrote:  I am sorry to hear you went through such a terrible ordeal.

But I am delighted you seem to have beaten it.

The point that needs to be made here. Is how much of the pain of cancer is caused by the cancer and how much by the treatment?

In the vast majority of cases - the pain comes from the awful treatments and not the cancer. Chemotherapy is basically a race in which you try to kill the cancer and the patient at the same time - in the hopes that the cancer dies first. And then you can try and bring the patient back from the near death that the treatment put them through.

It is a heavy price to pay. But it is worth it when people survive. It is just incredibly sad that so many people suffer these treatments and then die irregardless. For the sake of a few extra (painful) months.

Yeah I'm in Remission now and pretty much cured. I've moved on from it and there's times when I even forget I had it. But proud of beating it nonetheless.

The scary thing about cancer is that you don't know if you have it or not. If you go to your local doctor and tell him that you have pain in your stomach, they will probably just give you an acid reducer or something and call it a day. I never really felt anything until I fainted one day from a very sharp stabbing pain in my arm and stomach. My parents took me to the hospital and that's when they performed a CT Scan on me and found that my lungs were covered with white spots all over the place which then I was hospitalized. I was there in the hospital for a month as they were trying to figure out what the hell I had. Doctor, after doctor, after doctor all while my symptoms were getting worse.

If I remember correctly I coughed up blood a few times, had non-stop bronchitis that wouldn't go away with antibiotics which made the bleeding worse. It was terrible. On top of that the sharp stabbing pain was getting worse and worse and they had to give me a very very potent pain-killer so I could at least chill normally. At one point I had trouble even walking, and felt like an old man and came to a point where my heart rate shot up to 150 just for simply getting up off the bed. I was slowly dying as the doctors were trying to figure out what I had. They then scheduled a lung biopsy where I had to wait another week for the results which came back "Advanced stage 4 Lymphoma" and I thought to myself "Well no shit!!!"

^^^^ This was all before I had chemo. Chemo was essentially just necessary evil add-ons. They gave me the steroids once diagnosed and my pain went away and so did the bronchitis and the coughing of blood, but at the cost of weak muscles, increased anxiety, insomnia and other crazy side-effects. The chemo did kill off the cancer cells, but it also killed white blood cells and red blood cells and they had to inject blood in me, because I couldn't breathe every time my red blood cells were low.

In the end Chemo is a necessary evil if you want to combat cancer cells, hopefully new technology can come up with a way to specifically target cancer cells only. I got lucky because Lymphoma is one of the most curable cancers today so chemo worked for me. It must have sucked for people with Lung Cancer or Liver Cancer or Brain Cancer because even with chemo, the cure rate is very very low. What kept me going was the hope that Lymphoma is a curable disease, I could not imagine what it must feel like to have a terminal illness where you know there is no hope.

Damn man, this is crazy. Hats off to you for getting through such a thing. I don't even know how I would do it. My mom had colon cancer around a decade ago now and she took some chemo. She didn't finish her chemo treatment since she couldn't tolerate the side effects. But a decade later she's fine thank goodness. It's the scariest shit in the world seeing a close relative laid up in the hospital with cancer.

Post: #28

My life plan is to increasingly do more dangerous things every decade. I'm still in my twenties, so I'm keeping it reasonably safe for now, but by the time I hit my fifties, I'm going to start regularly jumping out of airplanes. I'll probably take up BASE jumping in my eighties.

I'm not going to take the easy way out, but I'm not opposed to a sudden death delivered by my awesome lifestyle.

Post: #29

I know way too many dead people. So many, it makes me wonder how the fuck am I still here? The ones who just fell over dead with no fuss or muss got the best exit possible.

Post: #30

A lot of people seem to be missing the fact that giving up on fighting cancer would mean rejecting chemo, and that chemotherapy is a large source of the suffering in the fight against cancer.

Not having even read the article yet, I suspect that's a major premise of the suggestion, so it should definitely be taken into account.

(01-11-2015 06:19 PM)Plato Wrote:  Most people in the UK are not that bothered about death. It is a lottery and when your number is up - so be it.

Our realistic attitude to death is why so many of us are atheists.

Why bother with religion unless the idea of death terrifies you?

Or perhaps so many of you have a "realistic attitude" to death because you are atheists rather than the other way around?

Sidenote: I'm not promoting or supporting atheism. My point is only about the causal direction of the remark.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #31

Fair point, BB. The modos tollens could point either way.

lol - I just learned what modus tollens means today.

Had to make use of it! :-)

Post: #32

My dad died of a heart attack at 47 induced by liver failure caused by severe alcoholism. He was found slumped over the side of his bed with an agonising pain look etched into his face. He was warned to quit drinking, but carried on anyway.

My mum died of lung failure at 59 in hospital caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). She was warned to stop smoking, but didn't. She was heavily medicated in hospital thankfully, but it want pleasant watching her die. She was hooked up to a respirator, and was given the choice of being kept on the respirator with no chance of recovery, or to be made comfortable. She chose to be made comfortable, and died about ten minutes after coming off the respirator.

My grandmother (mums side) died of lung cancer in her 80s. It was a slow and painful death, and she died alone. She was however an absolute cunt and deserved much worse.

Post: #33

(01-11-2015 03:25 PM)Aliblahba Wrote:  Being 95 and getting fucked to death by a 25 y.o. Russian girl is the best way to die. Just my opinion though.

Post: #34

The best way to die is to live to extreme old age with excellent health and vigor, with a short period of weeks or months at the end, where your strength and energy fade away to the end, but even when you are failing and on your way out, you don't really suffer any discomfort.

Post: #35

Dying in a hail of bullets sounds alpha to me.

Post: #36

He left out the hush-hushed but cherished sixth alternative, "naked girl avalanche." Props to Homer Simpson for that one.

Post: #37

As a layman with basic understanding of the science of cancer treatment, I've never understood the logic of chemotherapy.
It's essentially finding the right quantities and mixtures of poison to pump into your body in the hopes that it does more damage to the cancer than to the patient.

Post: #38

Is gradually losing energy, watching and feeling your body become starved by the tumors hungrily leeching off it, a good way to die?

Or how about leukemia, where your body stops making proper blood cells and you feel sapped of energy and are prone to pneumonia, kidney failure, infections, and all sorts of horrible complications? Perhaps Gleevec, with its near-cure levels of treatment on chronic myelogenous leukemia, should never have been developed. And all those targeted therapies, many of which are used to increase both quality of life and survival in pediatric patients as well as adults, are a waste of money to you?

How about brain tumors? Surely it's the chemo that sucks, and not the debilitating pain these patients experience, even when placed on hospice care without the treatment. When us overzealous doctors are prescribing abuse-levels of painkillers to these terminal patients so they can get some modicum of sleep, we should make sure to tell the patient that they should be glad and that cancer is the best way to go.

In some cases therapy is a waste of time and we know it's not going to work. Most of the time the doctor will tell the patient this, and in the rare cases where this doesn't happen, and the patient is ill-informed, we are at fault. But if the patient feels the need to keep fighting, to feel as if they battled the cancer until the very end, and this fight gives meaning to their last days, then I don't have the heart to deny them that.

I think there are more important places to take money from than healthcare and cancer research. Perhaps if we started a few less wars in deserts across the world, we wouldn't even be having this sort of "pragmatic", inhumane discussion.

Post: #39

Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life - Chased to Death (NSFW)

Post: #40

(01-12-2015 02:37 PM)Hardy Daytona Wrote:  As a layman with basic understanding of the science of cancer treatment, I've never understood the logic of chemotherapy.
It's essentially finding the right quantities and mixtures of poison to pump into your body in the hopes that it does more damage to the cancer than to the patient.

This is how Every. Treatment. Works.

Don't believe me? Swallow a bottle of Tylenol to fix a headache, and let me know how your liver feels about your decision. Basic example: chemo (generally) selectively targets rapidly dividing cells in the body, by attacking DNA stability or the mitosis pathway. Cells without the proper DNA damage repair/detection (cancer cells) will divide themselves to death by propagating his damage. Other rapidly dividing cells (hair, stomach lining, skin) are similarly effected, hence the common side effects of nausea and hair loss as well as skin spots. It's not as stupid as you arrogantly claim.

Cancer is not like bacteria. Bacteria has cell walls and all sorts of things that we don't have, and these are easy targets to snipe with a treatment that should then have minimal side effects. The challenge of cancer is killing human (cancerous, but still human) cells without killing the human. Saying this is illogical is nonsense.

Post: #41

How long does a typical threatment of chemotherapy go on for?

It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

Post: #42

I'd say that dating an average American or British girl can give us just about the same pain of cancer if not more, but with these girls one would suffer much more while still being alive, so yeah cancer is the fastest I think.

Post: #43

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  How long does a typical threatment of chemotherapy go on for?

It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

Some good news for you.

Looks like you and I are safe, Speak.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #44

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  How long does a typical threatment of chemotherapy go on for?

It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life. :(

It really depends on the type of cancer and the stage of the cancer. The more advanced the cancer is, the higher the dosage.

Some go for 15 rounds with small dosage in each round and some go for 6 with very high dosage. It also depends how strong the person is and if he or she can handle it.

I remember they gave me a choice from 2 chemotherapy options as they pertained to my specific cancer. One was more easier-going on the body with less dosage and more rounds but it only had a 50% cure rate. The other was heavier in dosage, more stronger on your body with greater complications and with less rounds, but it had a 90% cure rate with a 12% chance of getting leukemia and heart failure down the road. Imagine having to choose between that. I chose the stronger version. It went for 6 cycles, and each cycle was 4 straight days of chemo and 2 weeks of "rest", and do it again. This whole thing lasted for about 5 months or so.

I've met a lady with breast cancer who has been on chemo for a whole year but with easier dosage. Sometimes chemo doesn't go according to plan because some patients just can't take the side effects. It also sucks when say the cancer goes away after your 5 or 6 months of chemo and after a year or two on remission it comes back, and you have to do it all over again.

Post: #45

(01-12-2015 04:44 PM)MidWest Wrote:  

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  How long does a typical threatment of chemotherapy go on for?

It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

It really depends on the type of cancer and the stage of the cancer. The more advanced the cancer is, the higher the dosage.

Some go for 15 rounds with small dosage in each round and some go for 6 with very high dosage. It also depends how strong the person is and if he or she can handle it.

I remember they gave me a choice from 2 chemotherapy options as they pertained to my specific cancer. One was more easier-going on the body with less dosage and more rounds but it only had a 50% cure rate. The other was heavier in dosage, more stronger on your body with greater complications and with less rounds, but it had a 90% cure rate with a 12% chance of getting leukemia and heart failure down the road. Imagine having to choose between that. I chose the stronger version. It went for 6 cycles, and each cycle was 4 straight days of chemo and 2 weeks of "rest", and do it again. This whole thing lasted for about 5 months or so.

I've met a lady with breast cancer who has been on chemo for a whole year but with easier dosage. Sometimes chemo doesn't go according to plan because some patients just can't take the side effects. It also sucks when say the cancer goes away after your 5 or 6 months of chemo and after a year or two on remission it comes back, and you have to do it all over again.

How old were you when you were diagnosed with cancer?

Post: #46

(01-12-2015 04:44 PM)MidWest Wrote:  

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  How long does a typical threatment of chemotherapy go on for?

It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

It really depends on the type of cancer and the stage of the cancer. The more advanced the cancer is, the higher the dosage.

Some go for 15 rounds with small dosage in each round and some go for 6 with very high dosage. It also depends how strong the person is and if he or she can handle it.

I remember they gave me a choice from 2 chemotherapy options as they pertained to my specific cancer. One was more easier-going on the body with less dosage and more rounds but it only had a 50% cure rate. The other was heavier in dosage, more stronger on your body with greater complications and with less rounds, but it had a 90% cure rate with a 12% chance of getting leukemia and heart failure down the road. Imagine having to choose between that. I chose the stronger version. It went for 6 cycles, and each cycle was 4 straight days of chemo and 2 weeks of "rest", and do it again. This whole thing lasted for about 5 months or so.

I've met a lady with breast cancer who has been on chemo for a whole year but with easier dosage. Sometimes chemo doesn't go according to plan because some patients just can't take the side effects. It also sucks when say the cancer goes away after your 5 or 6 months of chemo and after a year or two on remission it comes back, and you have to do it all over again.

Wow. Incredible that you got through that. If those were my options, I'd seriously consider suicide as a 3rd option unless I had kids to look after. I couldn't even imagine being on that shit for months given all I've heard about it.

Post: #47

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

What do you mean every other person?

Post: #48

(01-12-2015 05:48 PM)TheSlayer Wrote:  

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

What do you mean every other person?

Half the population will develop cancer at some point in their life.

Post: #49

(01-12-2015 05:53 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(01-12-2015 05:48 PM)TheSlayer Wrote:  

(01-12-2015 03:51 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  It's pretty scary that statistically, every other person reading this thread is going to get cancer at some point in their life.

What do you mean every other person?

Half the population will develop cancer at some point in their life.

Is that for real? How have I missed this damning statistic? That doesn't make sense. Does it mean cancer scares or actual cancer meaning the individual has to get chemo and treatment etc?

Post: #50

I don't know if cancer is the best way to die, but some professors at med school did describe the single worst way to die....


You know those silica packets that come with your shoes, or in pill containers and whatnot? If you were forced to consume a huge amount of them - they would basically dry out your internal organs, essentially turning them into plastic. The slow, excruciating pain would be the single worst way to die.