[HeadsUpHigh]

>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.

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.

[jmromer]

> That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live.

That's an exceptionally and offensively clueless thing to say. I speak from hard experience.