To hate this man who said 'cancer is the best way to die'

[Sallystyle]

Stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, it's the best way to die,' says former BMJ editor

So death from cancer is the best ... You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.

Well, fuck him I say.

Having looked after family members and clients in the last years of their life, please please let me die of a sudden heart attack.

Cancer will often give people give people the time to say goodbye and get their affairs in order, that is true. It can also often give them time to see and feel everything being taken from them in a painful and dreadful way and to feel very frightened, out of control and depressed.

I still have flashbacks to my Mum's death 10 years ago from throat cancer surgery complications. My Dad had heart failure and whereas he was restricted physically in that he could only walk short distances and had to pace himself, he died suddenly of a heart attack and his final suffering was around 20 mins. Up to that point he had a pretty decent quality of life and wasn't in constant distress and pain. I feel it was as good a death as possible for him whereas I can't think about my Mum's last 3 months.

I strongly suspect that this article has not come from nowhere. When i read it, my first thought was that it looked like the thoughts of a doctor who has seen people suffer through treatment and die anyway, who has himself recently been diagnosed with cancer and is thinking it will be easier to die.

I could be completely wrong of course, but thats how it looked to me...

I have a theory that this, and stories in newspapers like it, are part of an insidious attack on the NHS, and NICE. In Britain, we have SN ZnHS which is incredibly cost efficient b, partly because cost-benefit treatments are decided by a state-funded body, not private enterprise.
I reckon TZhAT is what this article is about.
And a slow news day.
It is a massive misrepresentation of ghe content and tone of that poor man'x blog.

That's interesting, treelights.

Interestingly my MIL would say the same. She has seen and nursed too many stroke victims. As a result she is paranoid about having a stroke.

OH's stepfather died from pancreatic cancer over 30 years ago. His GP said that a cold winter would have finished him off anyway as he had pneumoconiosis from working down the mine. He also said that that the death from cancer was a quick release for him as he would have had a horrible, lingering decline otherwise.

Still not a very nice thing to say though.

I'm with the character on red dwarf - something about dying from a heary attack at the controls of his private jet, at the age of 93 whilst making love to his third wife...

We had the conversation with dad when he was terminally ill as to sudden vs warning deaths. The consensus was dropping dead without warning was best. That happened to mum later and it maybe been better for her but it was still bloody awful for the rest of us.

If you were a single parent and had genuine flu and a baby, and no one to care for the baby, would you be able to have the baby fostered or cared for by social services?

I suspect this article has not come from nowhere. My first thought was that it looked like the thoughts of a doctor who has seen people suffer through treatment and die anyway, who has himself recently been diagnosed with cancer and is thinking it will be easier to die.

My thoughts too treelights

I have a theory that this, and stories in newspapers like it, are part of an insidious attack on the NHS, and NICE. In Britain, we have [an] nHS which is incredibly cost efficient... partly because cost-benefit treatments are decided by a state-funded body, not private enterprise. I reckon that [sic] is what this article is about. And a slow news day. It is a massive misrepresentation of the content and tone of that poor man's blog.

I think you're dead right, catfromjapan

I've tidied your post up a bit because I'm a good journalist . We're out there. And we read stuff properly. Much good it does.

Ah, sorry, wrong thread.

I have read the whole article, and I don't agree with him. Sudden death (at a respectable old age) is surely the best way to go for the individual. Families are going to grieve whatever. I would take great comfort in knowing that any relative of mine didn't suffer terribly.

My 90 year old grandma died of a stroke. Her home help was with her and she said she felt woozy in the head. Home help called an ambulance and she died on her way to hospital. All over within half an hour.

I'm very happy she died like that and not over the course of 6 months or something.

Chocolate That is how my DM died, only 70. My sister and DSF and I were very shaken, but from the very day it happened my DSF said that he preferred that she went like that, suddenly and in full possession of her marbles, and he hoped he did the same.

Which he did. A fifteen mile walk at age 79, then a stroke while loading his washing machine the next day, never recovered consciousness, died a few days later from pneumonia caught from being on the concrete floor before his son found him.

May we all be so fortunate.

I see where he's coming from. I once heard an actuary say that is a cure for cancer was ever discovered, every pension fund in the country would be bankrupt.

I asked my oncologist: If medical science found the magic bullets for cancer and heart disease what would we all die of, and he answered: pneumonia following a fall. And that was ten years before my DSF died in just thart way.

He should join me on a cancer ward sometime to see humans slowly rotting in agony in their own filth. Yep, certainly is something to aspire to

His blog has been misrepresented. I pretty much agree with what he's saying - and I write as someone who has known people who have died in a variety of different ways.

Obviously it's horrific to die of cancer when you're young (my mum was in her 50s when she went). But when you get to, say, 80, then death from cancer, provided the pain is relieved by morphine and you're well looked after, is much preferable to stroke (which my father had), dementia, emphysema (in which you struggle to breathe) or many of the other various illnesses that can get you. (I have a particular fear of degenerative diseases such as MND or Parkinson's.)

The other factor to consider is that palliative care for cancer patients is usually quite good in this country. Nurses and doctors in specialist cancer hospitals are usually caring and compassionate. My father was unfortunate enough to die on a general hospital ward and it was an experience I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

The horrific truth, which I think we're inclined to forget, is that dying is often a painful and distressing process. People don't just slip away in their sleep all that often.

Limitedperiodonly - you've made me laugh, blush for my poor self-expression, and admire your adroit [sic]. Journalists are very necessary -and I always admire people who can make language do what they want.

"The horrific truth, which I think we're inclined to forget, is that dying is often a painful and distressing process. People don't just slip away in their sleep all that often."

Yes ... so a sudden death is preferable , no matter that you didn't get to visit all your favourite places one last time or have your family gathered around you (looking sad/frightened), or make your peace with a relative or any of that other slightly whimsical stuff he writes about.

Surely it changes according to age - sudden death at 75 - good - because although it's sudden it's not that terrible terrible shock you get when someone much younger dies suddenly.
I didn't think it was a very illuminating article from a man of his position. I kind of wonder what he really was trying to say.

I really agree with this, Hackmum.

What he says about Bunuel thinking a lot about his death, and wanting to experience it is very striking. What Bunel's friend said was "Luis waited for death for a long time, like a good Spaniard, and when he died he was ready. His relationship with death was like that one has with a woman. He felt the love, hate, tenderness, ironical detachment of a long relationship, and he didn’t want to miss the last encounter, the moment of union. ‘I hope I will die alive,’ he told me. At the end it was as he had wished. His last words were ‘I’m dying’.”

Thinking of death as part of his life is something that is getting more and more uncommon. People want not to experience death -- they want to go suddenly, to not know that they are going, not have to say goodbye to this world. And people think that by going in this way they will avoid pain and suffering. But that isn't necessarily true.

There are worse ways to die than cancer - frightening and horrible and painful though it is. I personally fear more having a life-limiting degenerative disease; or having a stroke that means I am trapped in my body; or dying suddenly without the chance to tell my children I love them for the last time.

I wonder if sometimes we fear most is what our loved ones went through and if we thought it was good or not.
My mum died suddenly at 53 and I think about sudden death every day and from my own point of view - I'd chose cancer. :(

I wonder too JFR.

I heard him talk this morning and something he said triggered a memory. I've now had time to find the Celebration of Life given to us at my friend's funeral.

She wrote us, her friends, a message which she knew we'd not receive until after her death . As her cancer had progressed she had written us Round Robins and this, then, was the last. It's dated October 28 (I'm blanking the year) and she finally passed on November 5th.

She wrote "in fact cancer is almost a gift in the sense that it does give you time to say your farewells"...

It's that short sentence I remembered this morning.

The other thing to remember is the audience - this was in the BMJ, and he is a doctor writing for doctors.

He wasn't trying to tell the rest of us what kind of death we should prefer, or berating us for preferring one way of dying to another. He was just musing on his own preferences, which are presumably derived from many years of treating people who are dying and dealing with those left behind. So whereas most of us have formed our view of dying on a fairly limited personal experience, his view is presumably based on witnessing the experiences of hundreds of dying people and their relatives.

My ex was told he had two weeks to two months to live. He died two weeks and two days later.

He didn't get to say his goodbyes to our children in the way we wanted to because the day he had planned to have them over was the day he woke up not even knowing he had children or who he even was, and that was just a few hours after I had visited him and he was very lucid then.

Sadly, not everyone gets the time to say their goodbyes with cancer.

It took him a few days to wrap his head around the fact that he was dying then he planned his funeral and left the children money and bought them a birthday present for their next birthday but the day he was going to have them to say what he wanted to say never came. We just thought there would have been more time, a sign or something that he was going downhill and needed to say his goodbyes, but it was just bam.. lucid, delusional then dead in the same 24 hours.