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Reiiser OP t1_j6x9fdv wrote

Reply to comment by AlanZero in I'm (m) 31 years old from Germany and am dying of germ cell cancer! AMA by Reiiser

:) I'm getting not tired to explain this to people i hope this makes sense.

  • With cancer you CANNOT fight - you endure medical threadments that destroy you. But you hope it destroys the cancer faster than you. I know people mean well when they say 'keep' fighting. But the semantics here CAN be interpreted as 'You just have to do more! Fight harder' This is just not true and not fair to people who endure such treatments.

I'm not one for miracles i'm realist. If i get healed then there is a explanation why and how it worked.

Life is not fair or unfair - life happens.

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AlanZero t1_j6xln1b wrote

I hear you, and I apologise. I didn’t mean “to fight” in that sense and I certainly didn’t mean to imply you aren’t doing everything you can.

I also don’t believe in miracles in the religious way, it was just a shorthand for extraordinarily unlikely outcomes.

What I do mean to say is that if you continue to endure these things for as long as there are things to endure - is there a chance, no matter how small, that the mRNA treatment eliminates the cancer cells and you can live longer afterwards?

I think choosing an infinitesimally small chance of success in this matter is better than choosing not to try it. It is easy for me to say, but I have also been in similar situations in the past (enduring treatment with no ability to affect the outcome myself, having hope against tiny odds, etc.).

I was born with a severe heart defect so in my life I have had a series of surgeries, every few years, and many changes of medication and hoping that I’d keep living until the next breakthrough came along. So far it’s kept pace.

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phloopy t1_j6xttds wrote

I love that you called this out. Language matters and can be uplifting or demoralizing. Even when somebody tries to be uplifting it can be demoralizing, as in this scenario. As you said, there is no fight with cancer; undergoing treatment is a chemistry/physics experiment where, hopefully, one comes out of it with no cancer remaining and the ability to heal from the brutally difficult experiment that killed the cancer.

I wish you well and hope you keep on enduring!

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