Giving Up
I was reading on a cancer forum today and a woman wrote in that she had given up. She said she was stopping treatment and going to hospice to die.
Well, damn. I wasn’t sure how to take that. I mean, I was given a six month prognosis and managed to outlive it. Then the doctors got real somber and told me that I was really in bad shape, and they told me I had six months again. I believed it and sat around waiting to die. And I waited and waited. It was actually embarrassing me. I felt like, “what’s going on here? I should be fading away.” But I wasn’t. So I decided to help things along and went hunting for a physician who would help me die under Washington’s death with dignity law.
I decided that the end should be coming soon, after all, the pain was getting worse and I was less and less able bodied with each passing day. But the pain was being controlled, and I hadn’t upped my morphine dosage in months. The same amount was helping. It dawned on me one day that if I was dying, I ought to do something or have a little fun before I died. So I started living. I pulled out my robots and got busy designing my own. I played with remote control airplanes and helicopters. I took a trip to San Francisco to visit my son. Before I knew it, I was into the 9th month of my second 6-month prognosis. Yeah, I outlived another one.
So I realized that I was living and began to get cranky about things that weren’t going my way. Up to then I was figuring what the heck, who cares? Of course, living means having things go in ways you’d prefer they didn’t. As they say, life is what happens when you’ve made other plans.
So I began to think about this lady who posted about giving up. I wondered if she was in bed with tubes hanging all over and gasping for breath and wracked in pain. I wondered if she had just said the hell with therapy because it wasn’t getting anywhere, but otherwise she was doing ok. She never said in her post what her situation was. I came to the conclusion that if she wasn’t bedridden with tubes every which way, but had just decided to stop treatment that she was an idiot; not unlike I was. My answer to her was to tell her my story and that whatever she decided, Via con Dios. If she has life left but wishes to squander it, that’s her choice. The only thing we really fully possess is our lives, and we should be free to keep or discard it.
We can disagree with someone’s choices in life; most of us do find something in our fellow man to complain about. I know I do all the time. As a species, we’re nutty and virus-like. I happen to think we should try to be as comfortable as reasonably possible in this life, and do it as long as we can. The reason is simple; once it’s gone, it’s gone. As life gets shorter it appears to get more valuable.
But value is a different thing to each person. Some people think a meteorite is a valuable commodity, I think they’re interesting rocks. My life is valuable to me, even if it isn’t to others. The value I give to someone’s life is equal to the value they give it. If they think their life is important, so do I. If they think it has no value, I have to agree; it’s their life to evaluate as they please.
I hope that poor lady takes solid stock of things.
