On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
Best thing to ask your doctor is what they would do in the same situation. They usually give you the bestg medical advice answer but their personal answer can be very different with what they have seen. Although some won’t answer that question which is in itself a kind of answer.
My mom was an RN and spent time doing basically everything. She said her time in oncology, geriatrics, and hospice made her never want to treat cancer or undergo prolonging, because the chance of it extending the quality life was slim and quantity isn’t worth it when it’s miserable.
She died of cervical cancer when I was 23 (it was stage 3 by the time she went in for dx, so she knew something was wrong and chose not to do anything about it) and the only treatment she got was oxycodone and having me get weed for her for the intense nausea that comes from smoking cigarettes on oxycodone. She was in hospice though.
I, similarly, probably won’t undergo treatment if I am similarly afflicted, unless our treatments evolve from a toxic cocktail to something with more chance of working and fewer horrible side effects.
There are actions you can take to catch it in Stage 1 or 2, which is far more treatable. You would also likely qualify for generic testing, which checks to see if you have generic markers which make you more likely to get cancer.
I’m aware. She chose not to go that route, and I can’t say I blame her really. She cared for both of her parents when they died of cancer, and having done that as well, yeah. I still wouldn’t go for highly toxic treatment either, even if it does have a better chance caught early. Screw that; I’m already full of medical issues, don’t need to feel worse.
I’ve already undergone genetic testing due to family cancer history. I’m clean for maladaptive genes, as far as they know for now (I have several unknown mutations, I get letters in the mail every few years when they figure one of them out). But the world is a lot more polluted than it used to be, and I haven’t always made the healthiest choices in life, so… meh.
Like I said, if treatments change maybe, but I’m not injecting a toxic cocktail. And a lot of early-detection cancers they find and treat aren’t ever going to kill a persons anyway because they are too slow growing. So even that early screening isn’t without risk.
