Pros and Cons on Chemotherapy

My father was given a year for having pancreatic cancer if he did not submit to chemotherapy. Much excruciation later (three months), his specialist gleefully proclaimed my father’s case a miracle: the tumor had receded 50%!

Unable to ignore my increasingly gaunt and yellowing father, I asked the doctor, privately, what really was going on. Exuberantly he supplied the analogy of my father as being a car in perfect working condition except for an old tire. “Now, that tire may never be ‘same’ again, but otherwise, that car will last forever!” I believe he pounded his fist somewhere during the last few words.

Two days later, age 51, Dad died, the cancer having spread “throughout his body.” “Inexplicable!”

I’d much rather have spent those horrible chemotherapy weekends in the hospital with Dad at Scripps Bar, drinking a beer and rooting with him for the St. Louis Cardinals.

He deserved the best moments of the last of his life but was “optimistically” betrayed. Objectively I suppose he should have known better: by trade he was a reporter.

RUTHANN THORP-STANLEY

North Hollywood