Academic

Chemo Again--Stuntz

By David Skeel and Bill Stuntz

Last week, my latest and I hope last round of chemo began; unless things change, the plan is to keep going til mid-December and then quit for good.  I feel lousy:  low-grade nausea is a constant companion, and sometimes it isn't low-grade.  One of the drugs gives me a swollen and sore mouth, which makes eating, drinking, and talking painful.  (No doubt my speech has often pained my students.  Maybe this is payback.)  And, of course, there is the onset of Chemo Brain, just when classes are about to begin.  (What was I talking about again?)

One day, I suspect we will see today's chemotherapy as akin to leeches and bloodletting for patients thought to have "bad humours" in their blood:  earlier versions of the kind of medicine that kills the disease by killing the patient.  Of course, the comparison isn't quite fair, and it seems ungrateful on my part to make it.  These treatments are not killing me--on the contrary, they may be keeping me alive.  I should be thankful, and I am, for the skilled and decent men and women who supervise my drug regimen.  Whatever life I have left, I owe to their competence and commitment.  I can't say enough good things about them.  Still, it's a strange enterprise:  progress happens, but it always feels like regress.

In my many trips to the Yawkey Center's eighth floor--the floor where chemo infusions happen--I've noticed something interesting:  I'm one of the youngest patients there.  There look to be a fair number of patients in their 60s, more in their 70s, and some who might be in their 80s--all lining up to get the latest batch of poison in their veins.  That mystifies me.  Even for someone my age (I turned 50 this summer), it seems a close call, cost-wise--the drugs are hideously expensive--and health-wise, to take a chance on a few more years of life in exchange for the certainty of several months of hell.  If I were ten or twenty years older, the call would seem easy:  I'd tell my oncologist he can save his chemo regimens for younger patients, and give me the kind of medicines that make cancer-ridden bodies feel better, not worse.  Some days, I'm tempted to tell him that now.  Have we become so focused on longevity above all else that longer lives with large doses of misery seem better than shorter and happier ones?  It seems crazy to me.  But maybe I'm the one who's crazy.

Full post as published by Less than the Least on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).