Readers React: Is it better to forgo cancer treatment?

To the editor: Nora Zamichow’s Op-Ed article on radical therapies really touched home for me. I lost my husband of 20 years to leukemia 13 years ago this December. (“A radical cancer therapy: Don’t treat,” Op-Ed, Oct. 24)

Watching someone wage a losing battle makes a person look at life and “quality of life” differently. My husband did everything he could to stay alive — that was just who he was.

But having watched his brilliant mind lose cognitive skills and the rest of him wither away, I can’t help but ask myself if I would now make the same choices he did were it me.

My husband was completely asymptomatic when he was diagnosed. He looked and felt fine. I wonder if the quality and number of good days would have been better had we done nothing and simply let the incurable disease run its course. I will never know the answer, but I am sure that, should that same choice be mine someday, I will think long and hard before I decide to do what he did.

Thanks to Zamichow for shining a light on this subject.

Lori Keleher, Long Beach

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To the editor:It is the rare doctor indeed who will tell a newly diagnosed cancer patient, one who is scared of the unknown and who is shrinking from a bleakness that often paralyzes logical thought, to forgo therapy. Physicians are taught to diagnose and treat; that is how we earn our self-respect and our living.

As doctors we know the ravages that cancer therapy visits upon its subjects. It often prolongs and exacerbates suffering before death intervenes rather than extending a life worth living. We know that but most families and patients do not and, in grasping on to every hope regardless of probability, they expect the miraculous to replace the usual.

It is difficult to dash such hope, to add to the despair a cancer diagnosis imposes.

Paul Bloustein, MD, Cincinnati

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