‘My life with cancer’
Posted on April 15, 2007
Filed Under All, My Brain |
Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter has documented his struggle with cancer: Linda snaggged the magazine from one of our practitioner’s offices (with permission). Alter writes about the emotional ups and downs, the uncertainty, the private despair, the physical fallout like fatigue and the public need to appear chipper and upbeat - all things that Linda and I are dealing with. Suffering from stage 4 non-Hodgkins’s lymphoma, Alter is now in remission - a minor miracle which points out how no one’s experience with cancer is ‘typical.’
Mortality rates - usually expressed as a median like ‘4 years’ - half of patients live longer, half don’t - are hard to parse. If you make it past the median, you might make it for decades. If you don’t, you don’t. Not easy to plan a life around that.
Like Alter, I have a brilliant and dedicated oncology team: but it’s still hard to filter all that they tell me about glioma, not to mention the things I learn elsewhere. Cancer is a very complex disease, and affects almost every patient differently. Deciding on treatment is not easy: should you try therapies that have the highest percentage of positive affects for current and past patients? Or try new, experimental therapies that show promise? Alter also thoughtfully talks with Elizabeth Edwards - the whole package was an interesting read for Linda and I…
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[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptNewsweek reporter Jonathan Alter has documented his struggle with cancer: Linda snaggged the magazine from one of our practitioner’s office (with permission). Alter writes about the emotional ups and downs, the uncertainty, … […]
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptNewsweek reporter Jonathan Alter has documented his struggle with cancer: Linda snaggged the magazine from one of our practitioner’s office (with permission). Alter writes about the emotional ups and downs, the uncertainty, … […]
Death usually comes from immunodeficiency caused by the treatment, not the cancer. These people become sensitive to the slightest flu or infection.