Tuesday 21 December 2021
Out of the blue
This morning Mrs H and I found ourselves discussing the people we have known who were struck down by incurable cancers and eventually died. Not a cheery subject but someone we know slightly has a terminal cancer diagnosis which came out of the blue during the summer.
Not that terminal cancers usually arrive with no warning at all. There are symptoms which seem mild enough at first until they become worse and worse before the grim diagnosis is made and accepted. Then the inevitable adjustments are made because they have to be.
What struck Mrs H and I during this casual discussion over coffee and a mince pie is how many such people we’ve known over the years. We tend to think terminal cancer happens to other people because life does have to go on. Yet over a lifetime we have to see it as a normal enough way to go because unfortunately it is.
Our grandson had a school friend who contracted terminal cancer at a very young age and eventually died after some years of futile treatment. There have been quite a few others, young and old. Our daughter, the daughter of a family friend, an aunt, another aunt, Mrs H’s mother and a next door neighbour from decades ago who contracted pancreatic cancer and went downhill with almost startling speed.
We all know about these personal disasters and we know it could happen to anyone. Nobody is unaware of this grim aspect of real life. We cannot be unaware of it. Yet here we are being induced to panic about a virus which is very unlikely to strike down people below a certain age.
It is as if we are being persuaded to set aside what we have learned about some of the worst uncertainties of real life. As if we are being persuaded to set aside what we have learned to deal with because we must learn to deal with it. As if we are being persuaded to set aside our healthy human need to be robust.
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8 comments:
"over a lifetime we have to see it as a normal enough way to go because unfortunately it is."
We get to see all types of death as "normal enough", because we gradually get to see most of them, and we realise - against everything our futile hoping mind tells us - that death is inevitable and universal. But it's that "over a lifetime" bit that's interesting under current circumstances. A few thousand deaths from respiratory illness that are spread out over the average lifetime; we wouldn't even notice them, would we? But bunch them all together during one Prime Minister's term of office, and it looks as if he was somehow useless and uncaring. So let's ring the alarm bells, and start passing laws, and buggering the economy. Just do something!
Strangely, although I shall be 85 next week, I know (I knew) nobody who has died of incurable cancer. I have known several who have had cancer put on their death certificate as a contributional cause.
There's no doubt that incurable cancer is a nasty way to go for many people.
And yet... if we managed to find a way to cure all such cancers (hooray for science!) then a greater proportion of people would die of heart attacks or strokes instead. Possibly later in life.
120 years ago 50% of people died of infection (mostly children). Now few do but a much greater proportion suffer diseases in later stages of life (cancers, heart attacks, strokes).
We had a friend who died of cancer in, I suppose, his early thirties. People were fond of him; he had a well attended memorial service. His parents came over from the Continent for it. But not his siblings because they'd already died of the same thing at about the same age.
Imagine being those poor bloody parents.
The heredity aspect can be worrying. My aunt died at about 75, both of her daughters died in their forties, all of various cancers. The saddest was our granddaughter (not related to them) who succumbed to a medulloblastoma at 22 MONTHS! So bloody cruel.
Sam - ringing the alarm bells so vigorously is the infuriating aspect of it. We should expect ourselves to cope well enough with good advice and a pragmatic approach but apparently we can't.
DAD - that sounds unusual, but maybe it's my experience that is unusual.
DJ - yes, if we cure a range of important cancers we move on to the other problems and one of the big ones is dementia.
dearieme - that's grim. Almost too grim to contemplate from the outside.
Jannie - that's tragic. In our experience, childhood brain cancers are rare but research into them doesn't seem to receive as much funding as it should.
Father (60), Mother (64), three friends in their 50s…
Ignoring freakish events there are three (non-)options, cancer, heart attack/stroke, or dribbling away having lived too long.
djc - my commiserations, that's too young for your parents and must have been very hard on your family. My mother had a double mastectomy to cure breast cancer but was later tormented by dementia. With hindsight she may have been better off letting the cancer take its course.
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