The day I learned that my father had lung cancer, I cried out in the hot afternoon sun in Guangzhou and felt completely helpless for the first time. However, as a son of man, can I shirk or escape?
This cognition supported every decision of mine in the next three years under great economic pressure and endless complicated medical affairs. It not only won my father 18 months above the average, but also allowed me to calmly recall and describe every detail of the whole anti-cancer process today, so as not to regret the wrong choice at a certain moment for life.
Here I would like to share my experience in accompanying my father to fight cancer in the next three years, and also let everyone who has been struggling in this difficult battle have more faith.
Patients are always stronger than we think.
In the limited cases I visited in major hospitals, more than 80% of the anti-cancer stories started from concealment. Our family is no exception.
Generally, when a suspected cancer case is found, the doctor usually does not directly inform the patient himself, but requires to communicate with the family members first. The family members who suddenly learn the bad news have no normal thinking ability at all, and often the first reaction is to hide the disease condition from the patient.
From some angles, this approach can be understood that the investment needed to fight cancer is enough to subvert the normal track of a family and requires all families to face it together.
However, this is another very cruel practice, depriving the patient of his right to know and preventing the patient from making choices about his life-threatening matters.
My father learned the truth of lung cancer through a nurse who leaked his mouth. At that time, it was the second day of his chemotherapy. The nurse in charge of infusion did not carefully watch the remarks on the whiteboard when he handed over his shift and told his father that it was chemotherapy drugs. Before that, we had always told him that pneumonia required antibiotics for a week.
In retrospect, this is actually very ridiculous. With so many inspections, it is impossible to hide them. What should be faced will eventually be faced.
What’s more, the patient’s will to survive is much stronger than we thought. After the impact of the first few days, they can accept the reality and become a help rather than a burden to the family’s fight against cancer.
Don’t panic when you find suspected cancer.
Malignant tumors and cancer cells may grow, spread and metastasize at every moment. Decisive and correct medical intervention can limit the growth of tumors and block the metastasis of cancer cells in time, which is the basic principle of anti-cancer.
I have seen the popular science of oncologists. Most of the early cancers are likely to be cured, while a few cancers have the chance to be cured even in the late stage.
However, another cruel reality is that the vast majority of malignant tumors cannot be cured at present if they reach the advanced stage.
What the current medical methods can do is to control the growth of tumors in a limited way, prolong the survival time of patients as much as possible, relieve pain and improve the quality of life of patients.
For patients with advanced cancer and their families, they should have a clear understanding and confidence, but they should not cheat themselves.
When suspected cancer is detected, we need to pay great attention to the disease condition, but at this time we cannot confirm three factors:
-
Is it a tumor
-
Is it benign or malignant
-
If it is malignant, what kind of pathological type is it in what period (stage)
At this time, a series of complicated and time-consuming examinations are usually required to make the final diagnosis. These examinations include:
- Blood examination (examination of tumor markers, and examination of the function of organs such as heart, lung, liver and kidney, etc.) Imaging examination (higher resolution than the initial examination to see the exact location and size of the tumor so as to stage) Pathological biopsy (removal of some tumor tissue through minor surgery to see what type of tumor is), etc.
Choices other than treatment are heavier.
In the process of anti-cancer, medical matters basically have objective references, and what is more difficult is those things outside medicine. Facing cancer, family members have to face a series of helpless choices from the beginning.
First of all, it should be clear that for cancer, the whole diagnosis and treatment process requires a lot of expenses, especially for advanced cancer.
The newly diagnosed doctor told me that the expected survival time of advanced lung cancer is estimated to be about 6 to 12 months if it is not treated. If it is actively treated, some can obviously prolong the survival time, but the treatment cost may be relatively high.
For me, who had just worked for one year after graduation and had not had enough family conditions, under such conditions, where to govern and according to what standards became a very realistic and urgent problem.
In Hubei’s hometown, the cost will be much lower and the reimbursement rate will be high. In Guangzhou, where my sister and I work, the medical conditions will be much better, and we can take turns to accompany them, but the cost will be much higher and the proportion of reimbursement in other places will be very low.
This is the first painful choice I have to make.
Through the communication with the doctor, I know that these medical expenses do not need to be taken out at one time, and different medical conditions have certain influence on the treatment effect. At that time, although I did not have much savings, my monthly income was not low and continued to grow. So I decided to exchange my 3-year salary for my father’s 3-year life.
In the end, I chose the best 3A general hospital in Guangzhou for my father. At that time, I secretly demarcated the boundary for myself in my heart: I will try my best to give my father the best medical conditions within the range of 600,000 yuan in 5 years. If I exceed this range, I may drag the whole family into the quagmire that is difficult to break free, which is also what my father would never like to see.
Although I have not communicated directly with my father, I am sure I can reach a tacit understanding with him.
After my father left, I roughly calculated that the medical expenses during the 28-month treatment were about 350,000 yuan, excluding 20% of the reimbursement for rural cooperative medical care, which was actually about 300,000 yuan. Apart from occasionally borrowing 10,000 or 20,000 yuan from friends in the middle, the whole was still able to continue.
Of course, this is based on the fact that the treatment is effective. If there is no curative effect at the beginning, the treatment will have to be stopped. On the contrary, it may not cost so much money.
Letting go at the right time is also a kind of love.
The second painful choice is the choice between the patient’s quality of life and survival time.
Before and after his father received 8 courses of chemotherapy, 2 courses of head radiotherapy and 1 gamma knife radiotherapy, he experienced all the pain of side effects.
Each patient has different chemotherapy drugs, different doses and different physical conditions, so the degree of side effects of chemotherapy to what also varies greatly.
Usually it is more important to prolong life, but when patients are in great pain, negative treatment can be carefully considered.
After two years of treatment, The father’s life span has greatly exceeded the doctor’s expectation. However, Continuous anti-cancer treatment has failed to eradicate the extremely malignant small cell lung cancer. By this time, we have completely failed to do anything about the new brain metastasis and lymphatic metastasis, because all available means have been used, and the father’s body cannot bear more direct confrontation.
At this time, I followed my father’s request and transferred him back to his hometown hospital to satisfy his father’s wish to return to his roots.
Pay attention to cheat prevention, but don’t prevent the wrong target,
Since my position has always been firm, my father has received treatment from regular hospitals from beginning to end, and has never tried any herbal prescription or so-called “folk therapy” of unknown origin.
However, despite all kinds of precautions, it still failed to prevent Grandma from being cheated of thousands of dollars by charlatans introduced by relatives in the name of treating her father.
In normal times, we can easily judge the tactics of these charlatans, but for cancer patients and their families who have been suppressed by despair for a long time and are unwilling to do so, these clumsy scams are really very tempting.
Give it a try, what if it is true? Just believe it once, anyway, there is no way out, believe him, maybe, there will be miracles…
It is in this psychological struggle that desperate families are drained of their last financial resources and plunged into deeper helplessness and remorse. Of course, miracles will not happen, and being cheated and regretting is really incurable.
From my experience, as long as you go to a regular hospital, believe in the doctor’s integrity and accept the doctor’s arrangement, it is definitely the best choice for anti-cancer families.
However, the road to anti-cancer is extremely difficult, and the cost is often tens of thousands of dollars. Tiger and wolf drugs are poured into the body bottle by bottle. Without the trust between doctors and patients, anti-cancer treatment cannot proceed smoothly.
I have seen several patients terminate treatment and switch to folk prescription without authorization because they questioned the doctor’s judgment. When it became more serious, they turned to the original doctor for help. At this time, the doctor could only sigh lightly.
Finally, I hope you will never use these experiences to see this article.