Safe and Secure

Harry saw the oncologist on Monday and the prognosis was worse than expected.  The hospital will try a mixture of chemotherapies but they said that doing nothing would also be a choice.

They were kind, they had the top Professor in the hospital there and they took it all slowly and deliberately, explaining every step, treatment and side-effect.  But it was all chilling and more or less an end.

He is not emotional like his sister and has hardly said much since we returned from the hospital.  What is going on in my mind, I have not a clue.

Would I behave differently?  I don’t know, but I suspect I’d want to talk and give my children and grandchildren all of the gory and funny details of my life.  I can be very talkative.  I suspect too, I’d be drinking a lot but does that matter.  Harry doesn’t.  But then smoking was probably the wrong choice.

My fridge is now fairly full of alternative treatments for Harry’s pancreatic cancer.

Quite frankly, I think they are a waste of time and are only there because some con-artist has found a way to remove some hard-earned money from the desperate or the downright gullible.

My point is that if they were that good, then we’d all be using them.

But don’t believe me, read what is said in Patrick Swayze’s entry in Wikipedia.

When Barbara Walters asked him if he was using any holistic or alternative methods of treatment besides the chemotherapy, Swayze admitted to using some Chinese herbs, but not much. He then voiced his opposition to alternative therapy, as noted by ABC News journalist Joseph Brownstein:

Because of the grim prognosis, many patients turn to alternative therapies without scientific evidence behind them. Swayze did not.

“That’s one thing I’m not gonna do, is chase, is chase staying alive. I’m not, you know, you’ll spend so much time chasing staying alive you won’t live, you know? I wanna live. If anybody had that cure out there like so many people swear to me they do, you’d be two things: you’d be very rich, and you’d be very famous. Otherwise, shut up,” he told Barbara Walters in an interview that aired in January of this year.

Swayze’s feelings may be correct, according to a study released last month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. That study — from Columbia University Medical Center — compared standard pancreatic cancer care, including the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine, with a popular alternative therapy known as the Gonzalez regimen. Researchers found that patients on the alternative regimen had a median survival time of a little over 4 months, while patients taking the standard of care regimen survived for a median of 14 months.

One of the troubles of chemotherapy is that it is generally very painful and you lose all your hair.  So if someone offers you a more palatable alternative, you go for it.

In Mary’s case, she wouldn’t have gone for the Tarceva. Even if it gave her a few more uncomfortable days of life.  Success is not just how many days you live past diagnosis, but the quality of that life as well.

But when illness gets serious, you bring out the big guns early!

I have found this very simple summary of cancer statistics in the UK.

Read it and some interesting facts about cancer are shown :-

1. About 294,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year in the UK and there are about 155,000 deaths every year from the disease.
2. Approximately fifty percent of those diagnosed with cancer live for five years or more.  My late wife didn’t do this with her breast cancer, but she was killed by an unrelated cancer of a different type.
3. With most cancers have you have a much better chance of survival than you did in the 1970s.  You don’t see this increase with pancreatic cancer.  It’s still about three percent and has been for about forty years.
4. Look at the ratio of research spend against deaths and you find that cancers like breast and leukaemia, get much higher research spending compares to lung and pancreatic. 

To me the last point is the most interesting.  Is it because breast and leukaemia are to of the most emotive cancers as they affect mostly women and children, that they get more spending?  After all the PC brigade will have you believe that if you get lung cancer, it’s your fault for smoking.  So is that why it’s underfunded?  After all, not everybody who gets lung cancer has smoked!

Pancreatic cancer is down at the bottom.  This could be because, it is such a difficult cancer to detect early, that if you get it, the health system gives up on you.  This doesn’t seem to be the case with Harry, incidentally.

So can I just ask anybody who reads this to do a little bit to redress this research balance, by putting your next pound, dollar, euro or Ruritanian groat into a serious pancreatic cancer charity.

After all, one of the tenets of a good investment is to put your money where no-one else does.  And pancreatic cancer research is rather thin on the ground.

You might well be too late for today’s sufferers, but you might finance something that will help one of your children in twenty years time.

They have been realised.

It’s pancreatic cancer and they’ll assess what to do in a couple of days.

You strive so hard and then this happens.  Perhaps, Harry’l win and perhaps he’ll lose.  But I think after seeing him in hospital tonight, I think he’ll fight.

It’s the only way!

I have just been reading about this on the Internet.

Pancreatic cancer (cancer of the pancreas) mainly occurs in people over 60. If it is diagnosed at an early stage, then an operation to remove the cancer gives some chance of a cure. In general, the more advanced the cancer (the more it has grown and spread), the less chance that treatment will be curative. However, treatment can often slow the progress of the cancer.

Not good!