Ask anyone how we prefer to die, and most would answer “Peacefully in my sleep, with my family around me and my dignity intact.”
The inevitability of our death is one we live most of our adult lives with. Nothing we can do about it, and a peaceful and dignified death is all that we can ask for.
No-one would ever wish to be become ill from cancer which attacks our body in so many forms and usually means a long painful illness and a slow lingering death. Today cases of cancer are on the rise, despite an increase public awareness of the disease, and how to detect the earliest signs of it spreading in your body. Behind heart failure, Cancer is the second largest cause of death in the Western World.
Dying of heart failure or a heart attack can be sudden and sometimes without pain. Although sudden and a tremendous shock for the family, many those who lose a loved one are at least feel a certain relied that there was very little suffering involved.
On the other hand succumbing to cancer can be a very long drawn process, involving great suffering, not only for the sufferer but also for their loved ones. They can only look on in anguish as the disease slowly destroys all the healthy cells in the patient’s body.
Cancer has been around for many years, and the medical profession also stands by helplessly, as they have no effective cure for the disease.
Treating cancer usually involves some form of surgery to remove the cancerous tumor. The surgery is invariably followed by a course of chemotherapy to remove any cells that may have spread into other parts of the patient’s body.
Statistics show that many people are more afraid of chemotherapy than the cancer itself. Chemotherapy brings with it a notorious list of the cruelest side effects, ranging from hair loss to nausea, sickness and fatigue,
The sad fact is that the medical profession sanctions these medical procedures to continue, even when they know that the patient has very real chances for survival. There are many who question the entire legitimacy of treating the patients whose cancer has progressed to as stage where they it is untreatable. Is it not better to allow the patient to go home or to a hospice, and succumb to their disease as peacefully as possible.
The cynical amongst us who would question the legitimacy of chemotherapy in cancer treatment might find ourselves asking the following question; “Wouldn’t it be better if the money spent on research on how to refine these highly expensive drugs used in chemotherapy, were to focus on trying to discover what causes the disease to invade our bodies in the first place?” Maybe by finding an answer to that question would cause the pharmaceutical industry’s ongoing profits to slide. But only the cynical amongst us would ask that question.