OCTOBER 6, 2017
D
uring the 11 months when my husband, Ahmad, was dying of bladder cancer, few people wanted to hear how he was truly doing. They wanted to hear about hope, courage, and positivity, not about how Ahmad was unlikely to survive or his ruminations on how to live well while dying.
I don’t blame them. Before I experienced it, I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it either. The problem was that we couldn’t escape it because his cancer overtook our lives. The only way out was through. And “through” meant living with the knowledge of pending death and its attendant difficulties and practical realities. I often felt I should candy-coat the story for others to spare them the pain of it, though I tried hard not to.
This is where many people with stage 4 cancer (also known as advanced or metastatic cancer) and their families find themselves: isolated and worried about being a “downer” to everyone else. They are taunted by the excitement of the latest breakthroughs — immunotherapy, precision medicine, gene therapies, and the like — only to learn that none are deemed suitable for them. People with metastatic cancer know all too well that cancer kills people every day. ............Read More
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