when a prince edward island man living with a rare blood cancer sent a note last year to say he had decided to stop taking his medication — the medication that was keeping his cancer in check — because he couldn’t live with the side effects anymore, there were many people in the leukemia community who were shocked. “we are so lucky to have a medication that has saved our lives, why would you choose to die?” was one facebook post from someone who had been living with blood cancer for more than a decade.
certainly on the surface, such a decision — one surely not made easily — seems bananas. choosing death, an agonizing one at that, instead of life? but when the man described in detail the things that plagued him everyday, including, bone pain, anxiety, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle spasms that made it impossible to type on his phone, brain fog, headaches and fatigue (especially the fatigue! he had written in big letters) — all things that had turned a very social social life into one that was darkly reclusive and lonely — it’s not so difficult to see how extending life would suddenly lose its appeal.
it really stinks, actually. there you are going along in your life when you and your body come under siege by a brutal, unforgiving disease offering worrying clues, determined to take you down with painfully unrelenting symptoms. then, you experience the joy and relief of finding out that there is a medicine to chokeslam it. except that while said battle is raging inside you then — and for a long time afterwards — many of the awful symptoms that led you to the treatment in the first place don’t disappear. in fact, they get worse, piggybacking on a whole slew of other unpleasant things that make living through it, and with it, seem impossible, or worse, unwanted.
4 minute read
