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TLADT24920 Posts
That's the name of this article. It tells the story of a doctor whose wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. He has worked for the past decade dealing with patients diagnosed with cancer so he's knowledgeable about the area. It talks about their struggles, the white lies, the medications followed and how everything develops leading to the inevitable end. It's a heart wrenching read and tough to stomach some of the parts but I would recommend it because of how impactful it is:
Ruth’s doctor never made us wait. No gentle approach, no layer of euphemism obscuring the truth, no gingerly poke and quick retreat from the scary thing over there. He filled in answers to unspoken questions. “There’s a lot we can do.” “This is manageable.” “You might have many years.” But then circling back. “It can’t be cured anymore. Our goal now is to slow down the cancer and give you as much quality life as we can.” To paraphrase, the films meant Ruth was going to die.
One day late that summer, just before Hurricane Irene, Ruth told me she was sorry to be leaving me. To know that she would be causing me so much pain. Best I could muster was, “Yeah, me too.” About that time my father died unexpectedly. Ruth burst into tears. So did our son. I didn’t flinch—I had already been ripped up by the roots.
Writer Daphne Merkin once described depression as a thick black paste covering one’s life. But it didn’t actually feel like that, nor was it a goop from a sci-fi film after the alien explodes. It was a coating, a thin translucent layer, invisible to the outside, hard as a diamond, and in that moment I couldn’t tell if it was holding me together or smothering me, but either way it was isolating me from the bustle of the lobby and the living world.
http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter-bach-2014-5/
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Good read 5/5 quality post.
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Northern Ireland22203 Posts
Cancer sucks 
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I had to stop on page 5, that shit was overwhelming.
Finished it, put me in tears.
Fucking cancer
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Every one should donate 1$ to cancer research
It will add up if enough people do it, but it won't cost anything to each donating individual
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TLADT24920 Posts
On May 09 2014 15:19 hellokitty[hk] wrote:
Good read 5/5 quality post.
thanks 
On May 09 2014 17:34 ahswtini wrote:Cancer sucks
On May 09 2014 19:51 goody153 wrote:
fucking cancer..
ya, it really does though if you are caught in stage 1 or 2, you have a high survival rate. It's when it gets to stage 3 or 4(metastatic like in this case) where for some cancers like pancreas, we're talking single digit survival values. Maybe one day we'll be able to treat a lot more stage 4 cancers successfully but for now, early diagnosis is the best thing we have(doing tests every x years, based on family history etc...).
On May 09 2014 20:13 Capped wrote:
I had to stop on page 5, that shit was overwhelming.
Finished it, put me in tears.
Fucking cancer
yes, it's quite the rough read. I think it brings out the emotions of the struggle very well. I was hoping that it finishes on a good note when I was reading it, like the guy was able to become stable mentally or something but alas, that was not the case at all
On May 09 2014 21:11 vOdToasT wrote:
Every one should donate 1$ to cancer research
It will add up if enough people do it, but it won't cost anything to each donating individual
you're right that $1 each would help cancer research greatly but usually, those who are touched by cancer(whether due to family, friends etc...) are the ones that donate aside from some outliers. The good thing is that cancer is accepted and is out there. Everyone and their dog have heard of cancer which will only help with funding. Compared to something like mental health which is still shunned by parts of society, I think cancer funding and research is making great progress (targeted therapies being a major drug field that's being explored).
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
God damn that last page got me
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Well, its at least interesting to hear what death of a loved one feels like, I have never experienced such a thing. I think there might be something unusual with me, I don't feel anything at all when I read it, I think I'm just too dissociated from everything. The only time I felt something was when his wife told him the last words...and then it went in a few seconds.
Also I have this strange headache and feelings of dizziness...I think its made me a bit depressed lately  . Well what can you do.
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+ Show Spoiler +It turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all wrong. The waves and spikes don’t arrive predictably in time or severity. It’s not an anniversary that brings the loss to mind, or someone else’s reminiscences, nor being in a restaurant where you once were together. It’s in the grocery aisle passing the romaine lettuce and recalling how your spouse learned to make Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad you’d agree to eat. Or when you glance at a rerun in an airport departure lounge and it’s one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon years earlier, an afternoon that you two had passed together. Or on the rise of a full moon, because your wife, from the day you met her, used to quote from The Sheltering Sky about how few you actually see in your entire life. It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.
That quote really got me. I basically went through the entire article, relatively unfazed, but that one passage made me more emotional than I expected it to.
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that hit a lot harder than I thought it would, no idea what else to say really, pretty speechless after reading that.
Thanks for sharing that article
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Fuck me... That was hard as hell to read but incredibly powerful. Her question about her son was completely gut-wrenching.
Thanks for posting that.
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On May 09 2014 23:44 BigFan wrote:thanks ya, it really does though if you are caught in stage 1 or 2, you have a high survival rate. It's when it gets to stage 3 or 4(metastatic like in this case) where for some cancers like pancreas, we're talking single digit survival values. Maybe one day we'll be able to treat a lot more stage 4 cancers successfully but for now, early diagnosis is the best thing we have(doing tests every x years, based on family history etc...). Show nested quote +On May 09 2014 20:13 Capped wrote:
I had to stop on page 5, that shit was overwhelming.
Finished it, put me in tears.
Fucking cancer yes, it's quite the rough read. I think it brings out the emotions of the struggle very well. I was hoping that it finishes on a good note when I was reading it, like the guy was able to become stable mentally or something but alas, that was not the case at all Show nested quote +On May 09 2014 21:11 vOdToasT wrote:
Every one should donate 1$ to cancer research
It will add up if enough people do it, but it won't cost anything to each donating individual you're right that $1 each would help cancer research greatly but usually, those who are touched by cancer(whether due to family, friends etc...) are the ones that donate aside from some outliers. The good thing is that cancer is accepted and is out there. Everyone and their dog have heard of cancer which will only help with funding. Compared to something like mental health which is still shunned by parts of society, I think cancer funding and research is making great progress (targeted therapies being a major drug field that's being explored).
Honestly, I don't really agree with our funding emphasis for cancer. What we do with funding is by no means a bad thing, in fact it's quite important; however the bulk of funding goes towards treating cancer and not preventing it.
Yes, we need to have ways to treat cancers that people already have, especially for people that are at a high genetic risk, but the funding borders on the entirety of it going into treatment and not prevention.
We'll get a handle on cancer soon enough, but just how soon is going to depend in large part on how fast technology continues to advance. It's not by any means in-feasible that we will have cancer almost completely treatable/preventable within my lifetime.
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Cancer is incredibly difficult to prevent, because it's really a natural consequence of living. Prevention of cancer is not so far from prevention of aging.
We can certainly work to reduce risk factors and increase early detection rates, but direct prevention would require messing with extremely fundamental pieces of the machinery of life. We don't have anywhere near the knowledge to do that usefully.
If you're referring to vaccines, those are only applicable in specific circumstances (for example, a targetable risk factor like HPV). The enormous variety of ways that cancer can manifest and the difficulty in differentiating cancer cells from healthy host cells makes blanked vaccines entirely unrealistic.
It's a lot more effective to target detection and effective, nontoxic treatment options that can be deployed early, which is why the majority of funding goes to those. For cancer, treatment is prevention.
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Prevention of cancer is not so far from prevention of aging.
This is correct. The number one risk factor for cancer, by far, is age. It's very rare for people in their teens, twenties, or even younger thirties to develop cancer...barring cases where the person had very high genetic risk.
We are not so far from being able to adjust the machinery of life as most people think. Already it's quite possible to alter genetic expression in various specif cell lineages using various techniques such as excision, viral vectors, RNAi, etc. These are a bit 'crude' in the sense of being able to manipulate at a very precise level, but they aren't terrible. However, we aren't as far away from effective medical nanotechnology as it might seem. It's very probable we will see the beginnings of this or more within the next 50 years.
As far as the information/knowledge aspect you are also correct. We don't have a good grasp on aging and it's genetic interactions yet, but it doesn't help that we hardly allocate any funding to it either. Obviously, it's a complex process, and not something simple like silence this gene, or block telemere shortening, etc. but it's still an area worthy of research.
It's also worth noting that while our knowledge right now is limited, biology has essentially been distilled to an informational science; and these sciences right now are growing exponentially. The amount we know 30 years from now will likely be orders of magnitude more than everything we have learned so far, which is something many people forget about technology. There is a tendency to incorrectly assume that technology will progress at a relatively linear rate but this is not the case at all.
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On May 10 2014 23:17 L_Master wrote:This is correct. The number one risk factor for cancer, by far, is age. It's very rare for people in their teens, twenties, or even younger thirties to develop cancer...barring cases where the person had very high genetic risk. We are not so far from being able to adjust the machinery of life as most people think. Already it's quite possible to alter genetic expression in various specif cell lineages using various techniques such as excision, viral vectors, RNAi, etc. These are a bit 'crude' in the sense of being able to manipulate at a very precise level, but they aren't terrible. However, we aren't as far away from effective medical nanotechnology as it might seem. It's very probable we will see the beginnings of this or more within the next 50 years. As far as the information/knowledge aspect you are also correct. We don't have a good grasp on aging and it's genetic interactions yet, but it doesn't help that we hardly allocate any funding to it either. Obviously, it's a complex process, and not something simple like silence this gene, or block telemere shortening, etc. but it's still an area worthy of research. It's also worth noting that while our knowledge right now is limited, biology has essentially been distilled to an informational science; and these sciences right now are growing exponentially. The amount we know 30 years from now will likely be orders of magnitude more than everything we have learned so far, which is something many people forget about technology. There is a tendency to incorrectly assume that technology will progress at a relatively linear rate but this is not the case at all.
While curing cancer will go a long way towards curing aging I personally thing that it wont be that easy. Sure cancer is mostly age related (more like its accumulation of mutagenic factors but for most people its the same thing) but getting rid of cancer and getting stable cell linages is one thing, AGEs and general wear and tear will just take over. Sure you can probably reach a point where you can grow transplants easily (if ab resistance havent fucked us by then) but you cant transplant the brain. Immortality is far off although living for a long, long time might be feasible sooner than we think if you have a ton of money.
Anyway I lost my dad to cancer when I was a kid and this is the best article I have read in years, I can relate to the kid in the story and the phantom pain is 100 % true. The memories that pops up makes you so sad but are incredibly good at the same time. 15 years later they have grown into something good rather than bad tho, because memories of loved ones are the most important thing we have.
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The problem with the aging/cancer is an accumulation of mutations/oxidative damage argument is that mutation rates are actually highest earlier in life, and morevoer earlier in life the body does fine repairing most of the damage that comes it's way. Accumulation of damage does play a role, but that is because the bodies repair mechanisms function less efficiently or cease to function as we age. A good example would be something like miR-34 in the heart, it's a micro RNA that is up-regulated during aging and results in increased fibrosis and cardiomyocete apoptosis. Inhibition of miR-34 drastically reduces these effects.
While curing cancer will go a long way towards curing aging I personally thing that it wont be that easy.
I'd switch that around. Working on curing/slowing/preventing aging, aka biological immortality, will go a long ways toward curing cancer.
I agree that curing aging, or even cancer, is far from easy; but it's by no means impossible or centuries off. Essentially what we need is to know exactly what is different in the genetic expression profile of someone in their seventies versus someone in their mid twenties and then make the appropriate changes to alter the expression profile in someone who is older. This is a BIG task, and exceptionally complex for obvious reasons, but as I said before at this point biology; especially genetics, is basically an informational science and the progress in these at present is very much exponential and will only be aided by the increasingly rapid pace of technological advancement.
The other thing that will likely be needed is even better mechanisms of altering genetic expression. Viral vectors hold some promise, but still have some issues. The gold standard is obviously controllable nanotechnology allowing us to make changes on a molecular level, but nanotechnology at this level is likely to be half a century away if one is being very optimistic.
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TLADT24920 Posts
On May 10 2014 01:25 Plexa wrote:God damn that last page got me
I think the last page was the most emotional
On May 10 2014 07:37 radscorpion9 wrote:Well, its at least interesting to hear what death of a loved one feels like, I have never experienced such a thing. I think there might be something unusual with me, I don't feel anything at all when I read it, I think I'm just too dissociated from everything. The only time I felt something was when his wife told him the last words...and then it went in a few seconds. Also I have this strange headache and feelings of dizziness...I think its made me a bit depressed lately . Well what can you do.
hmm not sure. I can be very dissociated at times as well but found the article emotionally charged as it progressed.
On May 10 2014 08:05 MtlGuitarist97 wrote:+ Show Spoiler +It turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all wrong. The waves and spikes don’t arrive predictably in time or severity. It’s not an anniversary that brings the loss to mind, or someone else’s reminiscences, nor being in a restaurant where you once were together. It’s in the grocery aisle passing the romaine lettuce and recalling how your spouse learned to make Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad you’d agree to eat. Or when you glance at a rerun in an airport departure lounge and it’s one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon years earlier, an afternoon that you two had passed together. Or on the rise of a full moon, because your wife, from the day you met her, used to quote from The Sheltering Sky about how few you actually see in your entire life. It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.
That quote really got me. I basically went through the entire article, relatively unfazed, but that one passage made me more emotional than I expected it to.
ya, that's a powerful part as well.
On May 10 2014 08:29 Toadesstern wrote:
that hit a lot harder than I thought it would, no idea what else to say really, pretty speechless after reading that.
Thanks for sharing that article
it's ok, it was a rough article to read that's for sure. np, will share more if I come across them.
On May 10 2014 14:09 Brett wrote:
Fuck me... That was hard as hell to read but incredibly powerful. Her question about her son was completely gut-wrenching.
Thanks for posting that.
yes, that part too. Wonder how the son is doing these days as well. np, will share more if I come across them.
On May 10 2014 15:03 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +On May 09 2014 23:44 BigFan wrote:On May 09 2014 15:19 hellokitty[hk] wrote:
Good read 5/5 quality post. thanks On May 09 2014 17:34 ahswtini wrote:Cancer sucks On May 09 2014 19:51 goody153 wrote:
fucking cancer.. ya, it really does though if you are caught in stage 1 or 2, you have a high survival rate. It's when it gets to stage 3 or 4(metastatic like in this case) where for some cancers like pancreas, we're talking single digit survival values. Maybe one day we'll be able to treat a lot more stage 4 cancers successfully but for now, early diagnosis is the best thing we have(doing tests every x years, based on family history etc...). On May 09 2014 20:13 Capped wrote:
I had to stop on page 5, that shit was overwhelming.
Finished it, put me in tears.
Fucking cancer yes, it's quite the rough read. I think it brings out the emotions of the struggle very well. I was hoping that it finishes on a good note when I was reading it, like the guy was able to become stable mentally or something but alas, that was not the case at all On May 09 2014 21:11 vOdToasT wrote:
Every one should donate 1$ to cancer research
It will add up if enough people do it, but it won't cost anything to each donating individual you're right that $1 each would help cancer research greatly but usually, those who are touched by cancer(whether due to family, friends etc...) are the ones that donate aside from some outliers. The good thing is that cancer is accepted and is out there. Everyone and their dog have heard of cancer which will only help with funding. Compared to something like mental health which is still shunned by parts of society, I think cancer funding and research is making great progress (targeted therapies being a major drug field that's being explored). Honestly, I don't really agree with our funding emphasis for cancer. What we do with funding is by no means a bad thing, in fact it's quite important; however the bulk of funding goes towards treating cancer and not preventing it. Yes, we need to have ways to treat cancers that people already have, especially for people that are at a high genetic risk, but the funding borders on the entirety of it going into treatment and not prevention. We'll get a handle on cancer soon enough, but just how soon is going to depend in large part on how fast technology continues to advance. It's not by any means in-feasible that we will have cancer almost completely treatable/preventable within my lifetime.
hmm I dunno. While I agree that prevention is very important, I think treatment is just as important. Obviously preventing it will prevent a lot of people needing treatment but you can't enforce some rules and they seem to be doing a good job up here. As an example, female patients above 50 are encouraged to do a mammography every 2 years(or 1 year if you're high risk(genetic like BRCA genes etc...)). For colon cancer, fecal occult blood tests (FOBT) are recommended to be done every 2 years for patients above 50 and for high risk(or who are positive), colonoscopy is done every 5 years. I think if people were more compliant, then we'll get a lot less cancer cases and such.
On May 11 2014 02:27 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2014 23:17 L_Master wrote:Prevention of cancer is not so far from prevention of aging. This is correct. The number one risk factor for cancer, by far, is age. It's very rare for people in their teens, twenties, or even younger thirties to develop cancer...barring cases where the person had very high genetic risk. We are not so far from being able to adjust the machinery of life as most people think. Already it's quite possible to alter genetic expression in various specif cell lineages using various techniques such as excision, viral vectors, RNAi, etc. These are a bit 'crude' in the sense of being able to manipulate at a very precise level, but they aren't terrible. However, we aren't as far away from effective medical nanotechnology as it might seem. It's very probable we will see the beginnings of this or more within the next 50 years. As far as the information/knowledge aspect you are also correct. We don't have a good grasp on aging and it's genetic interactions yet, but it doesn't help that we hardly allocate any funding to it either. Obviously, it's a complex process, and not something simple like silence this gene, or block telemere shortening, etc. but it's still an area worthy of research. It's also worth noting that while our knowledge right now is limited, biology has essentially been distilled to an informational science; and these sciences right now are growing exponentially. The amount we know 30 years from now will likely be orders of magnitude more than everything we have learned so far, which is something many people forget about technology. There is a tendency to incorrectly assume that technology will progress at a relatively linear rate but this is not the case at all. While curing cancer will go a long way towards curing aging I personally thing that it wont be that easy. Sure cancer is mostly age related (more like its accumulation of mutagenic factors but for most people its the same thing) but getting rid of cancer and getting stable cell linages is one thing, AGEs and general wear and tear will just take over. Sure you can probably reach a point where you can grow transplants easily (if ab resistance havent fucked us by then) but you cant transplant the brain. Immortality is far off although living for a long, long time might be feasible sooner than we think if you have a ton of money. Anyway I lost my dad to cancer when I was a kid and this is the best article I have read in years, I can relate to the kid in the story and the phantom pain is 100 % true. The memories that pops up makes you so sad but are incredibly good at the same time. 15 years later they have grown into something good rather than bad tho, because memories of loved ones are the most important thing we have.
I'm sorry to hear about that. Should've taken that into account when I made this blog ><; I'm glad that you found that the article was well written and illustrates how things went down.
On May 11 2014 08:23 L_Master wrote:The problem with the aging/cancer is an accumulation of mutations/oxidative damage argument is that mutation rates are actually highest earlier in life, and morevoer earlier in life the body does fine repairing most of the damage that comes it's way. Accumulation of damage does play a role, but that is because the bodies repair mechanisms function less efficiently or cease to function as we age. A good example would be something like miR-34 in the heart, it's a micro RNA that is up-regulated during aging and results in increased fibrosis and cardiomyocete apoptosis. Inhibition of miR-34 drastically reduces these effects. Show nested quote +While curing cancer will go a long way towards curing aging I personally thing that it wont be that easy. I'd switch that around. Working on curing/slowing/preventing aging, aka biological immortality, will go a long ways toward curing cancer. I agree that curing aging, or even cancer, is far from easy; but it's by no means impossible or centuries off. Essentially what we need is to know exactly what is different in the genetic expression profile of someone in their seventies versus someone in their mid twenties and then make the appropriate changes to alter the expression profile in someone who is older. This is a BIG task, and exceptionally complex for obvious reasons, but as I said before at this point biology; especially genetics, is basically an informational science and the progress in these at present is very much exponential and will only be aided by the increasingly rapid pace of technological advancement. The other thing that will likely be needed is even better mechanisms of altering genetic expression. Viral vectors hold some promise, but still have some issues. The gold standard is obviously controllable nanotechnology allowing us to make changes on a molecular level, but nanotechnology at this level is likely to be half a century away if one is being very optimistic.
hmm I'll agree to the idea that when you age, lots of important enzyme mechanisms are downregulated or don't work as well thus you accumulate toxic metabolites or ROS which damage cells and such. For cancer, there's a lot of different mechanisms that it affects and personally, I think it's going to take a long long time before we are able to get to a point where cancer is a disease that is very treatable(thinking later stages here, not earlier). You've probably seen this before:
+ Show Spoiler +
I will agree that curing/slowing/preventing aging will help with cancer but it's only a single factor since cancer is multifactorial. Epigenetics (DNA methylation etc...) can play a big role as well in helping against cancer. Same with targeted therapies like targeting HER2 positive cancers with herceptin (monoclonal antibody) but I doubt either of these will help much with aging (maybe a bit of epigenetics). I'm not as familiar with nanotechnology though I know for imaging, they have a bit of application.
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