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| Not everyone's cup of tea but it is refreshing |
I can recommend Henry Marsh’s autobiographical, Do no Harm, mainly for its frankness. A neurosurgeon, now retired, specialising in cranial surgery, he really spills the beans on the risks of cutting into the brain and how depressing the success rates are. Despite the terrors and the gloom it’s become a best-seller.
His third book, And Finally, is equally frank but from a different perspective. The ex-surgeon is now a patient having been diagnosed with cancer. So have I. But whereas advanced age, medical ignorance, a long marriage, writing and learning to sing have helped me shrug at what lies ahead, Marsh is at a disadvantage. He’s dealt with cancer patients throughout his professional life and knows exactly what the endgame is like. Contemplating that future has reduced him to tears on several occasions. I wasn’t untouched by these admissions.
If a little learning is a dangerous thing, a lot of learning may feel like a premature death sentence.
Should I be reading this book? I asked myself. Given I’ve deliberately discouraged many medical people from delivering prognoses (Not much discouragement needed.). Here’s the point: When asked to predict, doctors resort to statistics which have a “mass” truth. Yet we patients differ in hundreds of ways and sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander. Also – for the best of reasons – medical folk default to euphemism wherein spades cease to be spades. And I hate blather.
May truth be hurtful? Once again it depends on the individual. If you can stand truth take the initiative talking to the medico. Be prepared to use a direct vocabulary (It’s “cancer” not “Uh-huh”.) and refer to death as a possibility. If not, be vague. The medico will take the hint.
It used to be common for doctors to avoid telling patients the truth about dying. That changed in the past 30 or so years, and it became the sick person's "right" to know the truth. As if one size fits all. This is a good reminder that as patients, we should speak up about our needs. After all, we know ourselves best.
ReplyDelete"I hate blather" is my favorite sentence in this post.
Colette: Do doctors offer any useful info about dying? Isn't it something we make up as we go along? A bit like tiling the bathroom, you do it once, becoming an expert en passant, then never do it again.
ReplyDeleteI, too, have recently read "And Finally" and both his previous books. His first I read whilst recuperating from a stroke - not perhaps the best time? But have found them all fascinating.
ReplyDeleteWhat really struck me with this last offering was that, here was a very experienced and knowledgeable surgeon who had worked with cancer patients and yet he had ignored the obvious signs of prostate cancer in himself for 25 years. It has reached the stage where it is untreatable, and so a death sentence. How was he able to put his head under the bedclothes for so long, with all his knowledge and experience?
I had signs of prostate cancer when I was 57. It was diagnosed then and I had the radical surgery of that time, which left me impotent, but fortunately not incontinent.
But I remain here at 84 because of that early treatment which has given me another 27 years of life.
Avus: Intelligence does not necessarily preclude irrational behaviour. Consider your own proclivities - a sentimental attachment to vehicles that are technically inferior to those manufactured twenty years later. Nor am I proof against this tendency; once I discover that a work of fiction is set in Africa I look elsewhere, despite glowing reviews.
DeleteCloser to home The Guardian recently ran an article about male reluctance to respond to body symptoms that could well lead to serious ailments. It seems to be something of a male failing, even if your reaction was the exception. Again I may cite my own irrationality: I ignored tangible evidence that something was wrong in my mouth until the dentist - cutting me out of the loop - reported his findings elsewhere in the NHS and this eventually led to a diagnosis of cancer. I may yet live and/or die regretting this delay.
It's astonishing how emotions can override logic.Most of the disadvantages of Brexit were publicised (albeit less passionately and less mendaciously than the so-called benefits of leaving) before the referendum; you yourself cited the vague "regaining control" as one of your reasons. Yet virtually all these eventualities have now come to pass leaving a sequence of governments (all stuffed to the gills with Brexiteers) tight-lipped on the subject or - the irony is so painful - now flirting with the idea of the opening the UK's gates to exactly the sort of immigrants our economy so desperately needs and who were so eagerly shut our by the leave vote.
In a broader sense how can intelligent people contrive to ignore logical propositions? It seems so... well... illogical. Yet I cannot exclude myself and I freely confess I've been guilty of such perversity. Perhaps because logical answers don't always carry much in the way of comfort. The biblical fable about two women fighting over the motherhood of a child and the judge offering to cut the child in two is one example. The unspoken and underlying benefit of this becomes clearer after a moment's thought - the child was never going to be cut in two. And the true mother, moved by a real love of the child, volunteered to withdraw from the conflict to save the child's life. Thus the child was given to her.
And yet the logical proposition, as it stood, was horrifically uncomfortable. Go figure, as Americans are wont to say.