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by jmromer
2671 days ago
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> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare. This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life. I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I make are to the body's fight with the disease, not the patient's actions. In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death. |
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That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live. So it's as much of a fight as a non-combat situation can be. And there is literally a battle between the cancer and your body going on.
>In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.
And I'm not even american. I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to live and get rid of a fairly "unfair" disease. Because cancer can indeed be unfair in many cases. An e.g. smoker knows it's probably coming. But the very nature of cancer as a probabilistic disease means some people get the sort end of the stick without bringing it on themselves.