Afterthoughts

Cancer blogging comes to an end, but you can still read the introduction.

When is it time to wrap up the story and put it away? I’ll be visiting the hospital every three months for a year, then every four months, then every six. I’ll be under observation for five years, if everything goes well. I don’t have the patience, or interest to keep thinking about it for that long. To be truthful, once the infection had cleared up I was moving on. I decided that regardless of what the chemotherapy result said, the cancer story is over. So why blog about it?

This is still news to some of my friends. Phoning them up and saying “Hey, you remember how you said you’d give your right nut to be an astronaut…?” didn’t seem like a good idea. I still don’t know the right way to casually drop the news into conversation. I tried Facebook “Alun has been diagnosed with cancer. Technically due to precession of the equinoxes he should have been diagnosed with Gemini, except he won’t have two of them anymore.” It wasn’t successful. Partly because the character limit messed up the punchline and partly because not everyone saw it. Those that did see it were worried I was talking about other organs, so I had to clarify I’d lost ‘Dubya’. Named because he was a right… Comparisons to Hitler don’t work either. One friend assumed I was planning to grow a moustache. Telling them the chances of me being the next Pope have dropped by 50% only works if they know Latin. So blogging it gives me a handy URL to refer them back to.

There is a another reason though.

While I’ve been going through this I’ve read some pretty dire stuff. I’ve seen one more than one intelligent and thoughtful blogger justifying extraordinarily ignorant opinions about science on the grounds of faith. I can’t work out faith in what, because hardly any of the Christians I know are idiots. Even the one who is has Matthew 9:12 in his bible. I’m baffled. I can understand how a Christian might find solace in faith during treatment, even if I don’t share it, but making a virtue of rejecting medicine seems moronic.*

Finding information on what was going to happen wasn’t helped by having to wade through the brain-vomit of people peddling magic herbs or stealing wishes. Ralph W Moss might have spent years studying cancer treatments, but if he thinks a PhD in Classics is remotely relevant to that then either he’s fool or else he’s trying to con his readers. Follow the wrong plausible-looking Google advert and you get the impression that, if you’re going to a hospital for cancer treatment, you might as well pre-book your funeral. That’s stressful and not just because there’s nowhere that stocks Viking longboats in the Peak District. Even so, you can’t go around banning stupid comments. It’s down to others to make a positive case for Science.

That’s what the previous entries are. The reason I could be as relaxed as I was is that I could get the information on what the likely outcome was. Thousands of people doing what is often a very tedious and pedantic job have turned a fatal illness into something that is eminently survivable. I’ll admit it’s not perfect. The person responsible for the flavour of the contrast medium used for CT scans should have something really nasty happen to him. Like being made to drink it – except that would probably banned under some human rights convention. Despite that, if you’re diagnosed early enough the treatment can be good enough. My waiting before seeing the doctor was extremely stupid.

Science is certainly not a magic wand. When I went for treatment I was standing in the chemotherapy waiting room, so that really sick people could sit down with their relatives. I’m keenly aware that the reason I wasn’t that bad was because hundreds of people have died while doctors tried to find a way to cure testicular cancer. It is sobering to see this process of trial and error in effect for other cancers. Some of those people won’t be back in a year’s time. If their deaths are going to mean something then the most respectful thing to do is learn from them.

* Since writing this there’s been the story of Daniel Hauser in the press. I agree with Orac on this. There’s something much stranger than religion behind some of the weirder beliefs. Some of it is plain fraud, but certainly not all of it.