Having a child sick with cancer, and having to make decisions is a horrendous task...I know, I have been there...my son had a rare usually fatal type of leukemia....the docs told us from the outset, that the odds were even with chemotherapy treatment, he would probably live only between another 1-2 years without a bone marrow transplant...and they also said, that the chemotherapy he would have to endure was absolutely horrendous...it was a treatment that was much worse, than the treatment children with regular childhood leukemia receive...yet it was our sons only chance to try to get a cure, and so of course we consented to the treatment...
And it was absolutely awful...he spent the first 11 weeks after diagnosis in the hospital, the first five of those weeks in intensive care, so brutal was the chemo, so awful were the side effects...yet once he was in a remission, he got better, and was able to come home to some semblance of normalcy...but even tho he was in remission, he had to keep going back to the hospital for more and more treatments...because, as the docs pointed out, even tho he was in a remission, further chemo hopefully would keep him in remission...no more chemo, odds were great that the cancer would return...
There were times, when my son was so bad off in those early days after diagnosis, that he begged me to take him home, begged me to stop the chemo, begged me to let him just die at home...and believe me, I was tempted...I was in misery, watching him suffer...I even discussed this with one of the docs...who informed me, that if we tried to take my son from the hospital, and stop all treatments, that they would get a court order to continue his treatment...(We were military, and in a military hospital, and I know that they meant what they said)...
My son lived in total for 15months after his initial diagnosis...8 of those months were in the hospital...yet, the 7 months where he was home, we made sure were happy months for him...but it was so difficult for me to make him go through all that horrible treatment, yet it did allow him several months of being relatively normal....He was 15...I asked him, if through all the suffering, through all the hospital stays, through all that he had to go through, did he regret all that pain and suffering....he said, no he did not regret any of it, because it gave him hope, it made him feel better for a while, it allowed him to come home, and be a regular teen again, if only for a short time...
So it was worth it, of course...we did all that we could to cure our son....but its hard on parents to have to make their child live through treatments which are horrible...no parents or children should have to cope with such things...childhood cancer is a plague, which I hope someday will be extinct...
Thank you for sharing your story. I can't even begin to imagine what you and your family went through. It would do the rest of us good to reflect on the things we hold dear and perhaps sometimes take for granted.
Yes, I hope in the future fatal cancer will be a thing of the past.
In many cases, throughout medicine, and indeed, science in general, cures, breakthroughts, and advancements are developed through (unfortunately) trial and error, blind luck, guestimated intuition, and logical risk taking.
My hope is that the (optional) freedom to move away from rigidly standard and, most especially, forced standard care, will set the right conditions for the advacements we all hope for.