A Date with a Dying Man
Thursday, May 19:
We are visiting a gravely ill male friend who is in the latter stages of advanced prostate cancer. It is the hardest task for us because husband Olivier was diagnosed with the same high grade cancer three months ago. His hormone treatment is working and his cancer is regressing. And only hours before we knock at his front door, Oli has received his second hormone injection to continue the regression – the current treatment for metastasised prostate cancer.
However, our friend, renowned clinical psychologist Graham Quinton is three years down the track in his struggle with this life threatening disease and presents us with a harsh reality check.
He sits in bed, skinny as a rake and naked from the waist up. He wears the same familiar smile at our arrival as he always does and except for his emaciated state, you would think nothing is wrong with him. Except that when he plumps up his pillows he says how it exhausts him.
A psychiatrist mate is also visiting him and we three listen as the patient holds fort relating how an operation a few months ago had changed his life dramatically from a healthy fellow who seemed to have the cancer licked to a man struggling to stay alive. Nothing now works for him.
Graham is writing a book on clinical psychology, which he hopes to publish. We discuss this. And we discuss how he blames a local doctor’s neglect for his grave situation.
‘Of course I blame my local GP because he let 12 months slip by when I presented with erectile problems without taking what should have been appropriate testing for prostate problems,’’ says our stricken friend.
“I became so concerned I took myself to a urologist and asked to be tested; I won’t forget what he said after the biopsy – “too late’’.’’
It frightens me how frank he is with Olivier about the path of advanced prostate cancer. I wonder how husband feels.
However, I am shocked when he reveals that his oncologist is the same one as Olivier.
How naive am I? I had somehow imagined this dapper doctor could wave a magic wand and save my husband. Why couldn’t he save our friend?
The oncologist’s words of two days ago take on an ominous twist. The flip side of his statement that “some’’ patients with advanced cancer survive five years, is that many don’t. And our ever-cheerful friend, now in palliative care, will be one.
my journal | nadine 23/05/2011
4 Comments to “A Date with a Dying Man”
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By Marie Jonsson-Harrison, 24/05/2011 @ 1:11 pm
Very thought provoking, very moving, very sad 🙁
Love Marie xxx
By Diane, 24/05/2011 @ 4:23 pm
Graham was a great friend and already I miss him . Kathy and he were a loving couple , and his family are a credit to him .
By Roslyn Ross, 15/06/2011 @ 10:32 pm
Everyone has heard of the placebo effect but less have heard of the nocebo effect which is in essence, the negative power of belief at conscious and unconscious levels. Doctors are not God but they too often play God, making pronouncements, usually negative, about outcomes when all they are doing is juggling statistics and probably erring on the side of caution… which equates with worst case scenarios.
It is so very important that your doctor is not a ‘bone pointer’ nor a Dr. Doom and that he works with you to maintain a realistic view of the situation without talking in terms of statistics, time-frames or the like.
A young friend has just cured himself of throat cancer after deciding, bravely, to not have the recommended removal of voice-box etc., as advised by allopathic medicine and deciding he had nothing to lose by trying alternative healing methodologies. I am not saying that such choices always work…. anything can work and anything can fail… but allopathic medicine does not have all the answers and often takes too dim a view of the body’s remarkable capacity to heal anything because it treats it like a chemical machine instead of a holistic organism which functions through wellness and illness at emotional, psychological and physical levels… and for some people, spiritual as well.
No-one can ever gaurantee or predict your time of death and there are too many stories in books written by oncologists like Bernie Siegel and physicians like Larry Dossey which show the impact of a doctor’s words on prognosis.
All any of us can do is choose a healing methodology in which we believe and trust and then let go and follow the process as a succession of Nows which will take us through minutes, hours, days, weeks or years of whatever life we have to live.
By nadine williams, 16/06/2011 @ 9:04 pm
dear Ros, Such wisdom. We have chosen to follow a “positive doing” approach, laid down by the fellow who sold his business to Kevin Rudd’s wife when he was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma. still alive after 11 years. We are doing all of the above- simply living life every single day and enjoying each other’s company. Howver, we have got house help after this episode so his spine can really rest and I can enjoy him.