My doubts about the wisdom of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation in many, if not most, such cases was reinforced by the experience of my Aunt Daisy, my father's younger sister. When Daisy was some twenty years older than I am, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. After considering the effects of the proposed therapeutic treatments, she decided to accept only palliative care. It seemed to me that she lived out the remainder of her life with great equanimity. In fact, when I would speak with her, she was always in good spirits and up to date on the latest developments in the outside world. She was even reading about nanotechnology, which she discussed with me, knowing that it was a professional interest of mine. As far as I know, she never second guessed her decision to forgo treatment.
So here I am, without hope of cure, physically shattered by two surgeries and their complications, getting ready to embark on a second, more protracted, round of chemotherapy. As someone who has always second guessed his decisions, I have, as you might expect, been thinking about the wisdom of my decisions since my diagnosis.
The first decision, in early March, was to start chemotherapy rather than go into hospice care. That decision seemed easy enough. I was losing energy, weight, and muscle mass rapidly; wine had tasted strangely for a few weeks and food was starting to do so as well. If the chemotherapy became intolerable, I could always quit it and go into hospice care. In the event, although the chemotherapy produced a galaxy of unpleasant and sometimes frightening side effects, I regained energy and weight and got to spend a lot of time with family and friends over a three-month period (two months on chemotherapy, one off).
The second decision was to undergo colon and liver surgeries. After having been told from the time of inception that my case was incurable, the unexpected chance at a cure was too precious a gift to pass up. It seemed to me that I had to undergo the surgeries, regardless of their certain trauma and potential complications. As my daughter, Elizabeth, pointed out to me recently, if I hadn't undergone the surgeries, I certainly would have second guessed myself for the rest of my life.
How about the pending decision to resume chemotherapy? I think that with the particular cocktail the oncologist has in mind, there is only a small chance of something irreversible happening before I could stop the regimen. So I'll probably go along with his recommendation. But I'm mindful of the pattern of my treatment decisions: It seems to describe the very trap that I always wanted to avoid.
