Could be. I don’t know the details. But I know she lived for at least two years after the diagnosis, two years of seeking alternative treatments/cures.
My paternal grandfather had prostate cancer. My dad convinced him to get treatment (surgery followed by chemo IIRC). He never had a happy day the rest of his life (he was in his early 90s) and died miserable a while later.
My paternal grandmother had throat cancer. My dad convinced her to get treatment (radiation a few times, chemo). She was in her early 90s, suffered through the rest of her life, couldn’t speak or barely swallow until she died a few months later.
The guilt of convincing his otherwise fairly healthy parents to basically torture themselves to death haunted him the rest of his life (that ended after being tortured to death for about 3 months in the hospital - non cancer related).
His next door neighbor did beat the odds and made it a couple of years after a lung cancer (non smoker for life) diagnosis, it eventually spread to other organs and swamped him. But he was mid 60s. I think that extra 30 years was the reason he got those years instead of the torture to death route.
I would exhort them very hard - but spaced out at time intervals, and also bearing in mind that oftentimes pushing someone just makes them more resistant.
Having seen the horrors that chemotherapy inflicts on people, I wouldn’t be judgmental of a cancer patient who refuses chemotherapy, or is reluctant to undergo chemo and wants to exhaust all other alternatives first, though.
Well, my dad elected only palliative care for his cancer… but it was a situation where the best modern medicine could offer him was maybe a couple extra months. Maybe. And probably a lot of suffering.
If it was someone younger, with a more treatable form of cancer, I probably would have pushed conventional therapy more aggressively, but at a certain point it’s the patient’s choice, not mine.
./
Oh, honey. I cried when I read that. I am so sorry. I hope you can forgive yourself. Even the little that you wrote-- it sounds like anyone would have made the same decision.
My friend whom I cited in the OP, whose husband dawdled about seeking treatment, had a moment when he was sitting on their back deck after a pretty good day when he was still getting outpatient treatment. Suddenly he passed out and fell to the deck. His wife called 911 (as anyone would do) and he spent the next two months in the hospital and died there in great misery. She has looked back at that day countless times and wished she had had the intestinal fortitude NOT to call EMS… She can’t get over the guilt of putting him through those last days.
All you can do is what seems best at the time and realize that ultimately it’s out of your hands.
I coined a phrase back in those dark days (my husband died a month after hers), “Sometimes you do everything right and they still die.”
ETA. Deleted your post? Should I ask a mod to delete the quote in this post? Edit window expiring.
No it’s okay to keep it there. Sharing all that hit me harder than I’d expected it to, and I kind of thought I could bottle everything back up by deleting the post and not thinking about it anymore, but it’s out there and it does help to hear that other people would’ve made the same choice. I know that, rationally. Maybe someday I’ll feel it, too.
I agree with this approach. I would do everything in my power to make sure that they understood the facts correctly - what the effects of various treatments would be, how likely they are to be effective, what kind of outcomes to expect. I would make it very clear that I didn’t believe in any woo, and that they shouldn’t either. But beyond that, I wouldn’t try to convince them to make one particular choice. As long as I was convinced that they had all the facts, I would leave the decision up to them.
Apparently there is a discussion of the “Push all available treatment” mindset:
The huge expenditure of resources (money, skilled personnel, equipment, space, etc.) in what pretty much every medical-type person involved can be expected to sense are the last 3-6 months of a person’s life.
We have been dosing sick people with heavy-duty toxins, near-lethal doses of radiation, really, really invasive surgery for many decades now. By now, the folks in the lab coats can tell pretty well exactly how long the patient can maintain “Life” under the circumstances.
IOW: We have been burying some really expensive medicines, hours and hours of skilled labor, and depreciation of obscenely expensive equipment.
WHY?
As to the OP: never married, never close. My experiences:
-
1988-1989 Mother: A real fighter reduced to heart-breaking weakness by lung cancer.
The big problem was the damned chemo.
I will NOT go through that. -
1989 - Father - a weak-willed Mama’s Boy who did a “Me Too!” to Mother’s death. She had divorced the drunk asshole 7 years earlier and he lived (after getting out of the bottle) with the hope of getting back with Mother. He lasted about 3 months. I can believe that people can will themselves to death.
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The real outlier, SIL - diagnosed with Stage V Breast Cancer in 1999. At one point, she was reduced to being fed by tube. She actually pulled out of that one. She could not pull out of kidney shutdown.
She died in 2015.
For my parents, I would not have pushed.
For my SIL (mother of 3, and quite old-fashioned about everything, esp. Motherhood), I would have pushed.
For my SIL, nobody had to push.
Hope you got the Afterlife you believed awaited you, Bert. God Speed.
I’m so sorry that the grief over losing your mother is compounded by guilt and second-guessing. You did your best. If you had sent her to the hospital, maybe she would have died there, in misery, rather than peacefully at home. You just don’t know.
If it helps at all, my mother’s greatest fear is of being tortured to death in the hospital, the way her sister was. Won’t go into the story here and now, but the word “torture” is not an exaggeration. My mother would vastly prefer to go the way your mother did, rather than be sent to the hospital. My mother would definitely say you did the right thing.
Living this question right now. My husband has lung cancer and brought up stopping chemo tonight. I’m not going to push him, the chemo is killing him, perhaps faster than the cancer. He’s going to the oncologist tomorrow and we’ll see what he decides after that.
However, if he wanted to pursue alternative voodoo woo-hoo treatments, I’d push back against that… Waste of time, money, and energy.
I’ve heard of children as young as 6 saying that they didn’t want any more treatment, because they didn’t feel it was worth it. Not infrequently, the prognosis really is hopeless and they are right. 
I’m sorry, Heather. That’s a tough thing to face.
Many hugs to you. What a horrible thing to be faced with.
As for woo-hoo treatments, if he feels like trying some of them and he feels better as a result, I would have no problem with it.
p.s. I just came from another board where a poster said she was considering going to Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I told her to avoid that place like the plague; they are a for-profit entity with substandard doctors, etc. and they only take patients with a good prognosis so their statistics will look better. :mad:
While the voodoo woo-hoo treatments may not do anything…by talking him out of taking those, you are also taking away the only thing some cancer patients cling on to in their worst times…their hope.
I would satisfy myself that they are making an informed decision. If there truly were no hope through conventional medicine, I would urge my partner to not waste money on alternative medicine but spend it on experiences.
It depends on what the alternative medicine is supposed to do. If a person finds that massage leads to pain relief, or some herbal concoction stimulates appetite and/or relieves nausea or fatigue, I have no problem with it.
Going to Tijuana for the Gerson treatment (they’re the coffee enema people)? I wouldn’t recommend that.
My answer is it depends on the circumstances and particulars of the cancer diagnosis.
I am going through it right now and she is putting all her faith in my decisions. In my case all biopsies of the lung are negative but the surgeon is convinced that it is cancer basing it on the cat scan and the amount of glucose attracted to the tumor. He wants to remove the lung. We have an appointment next week with the oncologist and I imagine he will recommend chemo and radiation. The surgery is a sure thing at this point but will leave her with one lung and this is scary for her. The thought of chemo and radiation therapy is also scary for her.
I recommended we do another pet scan after 3 months ( we are there now) and see if it has changed shape or size. If it has changed I suggest she get the surgery and no followup of chemo or radiation would be needed. If it has not changed I am not sure what to tell her.It does help. Thanks.