Death And The Cancer Patient

This book is the first-person articulation of how a man with a terminal cancer diagnosis used the combination of mediation, psychology, and medical marijuana to transform himself into the best shape of his life after both chemotherapy and radiation treatments failed. After being told he did not have any treatment options left by his doctors, author Kyle Kostic intuitively and serendipitously created this method, which he is ultimately stating with great humility is the cure to not only Stage IV Squamous Cell Carcinoma and metastasized Lung Cancer (both of his diagnoses), but to all forms of cancer. This was not a school project, a work project, or even his life's work. His life literally depended on getting this right. He documented his story from beginning to end, and is continuously refining his work in real time on his blog as well as on his social media accounts. The intention of him writing this book is to provide this information to other cancer patients and their families, in an attempt to prevent them from experiencing both the emotional and physical pain that the modern cancer treatment protocol consists of. Thank you for your consideration. Love, Anonymous

Cancer touches everybody’s life in one way or another. But most of us know very little about how the disease works, why we treat it the way we do, and the personalities whose dedication got us where we are today. For fifty years, Dr. Vincent T. DeVita Jr. has been one of those key players: he has held just about every major position in the field, and he developed the first successful chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a breakthrough the American Society of Clinical Oncologists has called the top research advance in half a century of chemotherapy. As one of oncology’s leading figures, DeVita knows what cancer looks like from the lab bench and the bedside. The Death of Cancer is his illuminating and deeply personal look at the science and the history of one of the world’s most formidable diseases. In DeVita’s hands, even the most complex medical concepts are comprehensible. Cowritten with DeVita’s daughter, the science writer Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, The Death of Cancer is also a personal tale about the false starts and major breakthroughs, the strong-willed oncologists who clashed with conservative administrators (and one another), and the courageous patients whose willingness to test cutting-edge research helped those oncologists find potential treatments. An emotionally compelling and informative read, The Death of Cancer is also a call to arms. DeVita believes that we’re well on our way to curing cancer but that there are things we need to change in order to get there. Mortality rates are declining, but America’s cancer patients are still being shortchanged—by timid doctors, by misguided national agendas, by compromised bureaucracies, and by a lack of access to information about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s cancer centers. With historical depth and authenticity, DeVita reveals the true story of the fight against cancer. The Death of Cancer is an ambitious, vital book about a life-and-death subject that touches us all.

In Facing Cancer and the Fear of Death: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment, Dr. Norman Straker proposes that "death anxiety" is responsible for the American society's failure to address costly futile care at the end of life; more specifically, doctors default on the appropriate prescription of palliative care because of this anxiety. This leads to unnecessary suffering for terminally-ill patients and their families and significant distress for physicians. To address these challenges in the culture of medical education, increased psychological support for physicians who treat dying patients is necessary. Additionally, physicians need to reach a consensus regarding the discontinuation of active treatments. Psychoanalysts have traditionally denied the importance of death anxiety and report relatively few treatment cases of dying patients in their literature. This book offers multiple treatment reports by psychoanalysts that illustrate the effectiveness and value of a flexible approach to patients facing death. The psychoanalytic reader is expected to gain a greater level of comfort with facing death and is encouraged to consider making themselves more available to the ever-increasing population of cancer survivors. Further, psychoanalysts are encouraged to be more useful partners to the oncologists that are burdened by the irrational feelings of all parties.

This book brings together in one volume many important topics about death and dying, including the pathophysiology of death, the causes of death among cancer patients, the ethics of death, the legal aspects of death for the physician and for the patient and caregivers, the economics of death, the medical management of the dying patient, including pain and dyspnea, the prediction of death, and the spiritual management of the dying patient. It also discusses other medical and humanistic aspects of death and dying, such as the historical definition of death and various cultures’ and religions’ viewpoints on death and the afterlife. Everybody, including every patient with cancer, will die, and every physician will have to assist dying patients. Oncologists face this prospect more often than many physicians. And yet to date there has been no comprehensive textbook on Thanatology, the academic discipline studying death and dying, to assist oncologists in this difficult task. This book will help the physician to understand his or her own relationship with death and to communicate about death and dying with the patient and the patient’s caregivers.

This book is the second-person articulation of how a man with a terminal cancer diagnosis used the combination of mediation, psychology, and medical marijuana to transform himself into the best shape of his life after both chemotherapy and radiation treatments failed. After being told he did not have any treatment options left by his doctors, author Kyle Kostic intuitively and serendipitously created this method, which he is ultimately stating with great humility is the cure to not only Stage IV Squamous Cell Carcinoma and metastasized Lung Cancer (both of his diagnoses), but to all forms of cancer. This was not a school project, a work project, or even his life's work. His life literally depended on getting this right. He documented his story from beginning to end, and is continuously refining his work in real time on his blog as well as on his social media accounts. The intention of him writing this book is to provide this information to other cancer patients and their families, in an attempt to prevent them from experiencing both the emotional and physical pain that the modern cancer treatment protocol consists of. Thank you for your consideration. Love, Anonymous

In Enduring Cancer Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.

Rarely heard about in our society are caregivers' thoughts and feelings about life, death, and dying and how they act on those feelings. "For the Living: Coping, Caring and Communicating with the Terminally Ill" provides an in-depth, qualitative look at the experiences of oncology healthcare professionals as they work with terminally ill patients. Through a series of recorded and edited interviews, the author explores the social and cultural dynamics that affect physicians, nurses, and social workers routinely encountering mortality and loss. What death and the prospect of dying mean to these individuals should not be taken lightly.

"Perhaps I should have realized that cancer runs in my family. After all, three grandparents and my father and brother perished from this disease. Yet, when I received my colorectal cancer diagnosis, I was surprised. I never expected to be primarily identified as a cancer patient. Following a typical combination of chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and more chemo, I was presumably cancer-free when my post-treatment scans looked clean. Nonetheless, within a year I received a terminal diagnosis; cancer had metastasized in my lungs. Thus began my year as a dead woman--a time of chaotic emotions, new priorities, and rapid-fire plans and changes. Expecting the unexpected became a theme in my life, but the things that turned out to be most shocking are social, familial, and even my expectations about what is realistic for a dead woman to be or do." Preconceptions about a terminal cancer diagnosis frequently are based on popular culture depictions of cancer and dying, which can be misleading as a guide for knowing what to expect when you're expecting to die. This memoir provides one woman's often-irreverent, pop culture-illustrated guide to life that deconstructs some common preconceptions about living with a terminal diagnosis.

When I delivered the keynote address at our joint 1977 symposium on Cancer, Stress, and Death in Montreal, I took great pride in announcing my unique qualification for this singular honor-I had survived a normally fatal cancer, a histiocytic reticulosarcoma that had developed under the skin of my thigh several years pre viously. Faced with the physical and emotional realities of this situa tion, I refused to retreat from life in desperation. I immediately underwent surgery and cobalt therapy, but insisted on knowing my chances for a lasting recovery, which at that time seemed far from encouraging. Although I knew it would take tremendous self-discipline, I was determined to continue living and working without worrying about the outcome. I suppressed any thoughts of my ostensibly imminent death, but rewrote my will, including in it several suggestions for the continuation of my work by my colleagues. Having taken care of that business, I promptly forced myself to disregard the whole calamity. I immersed myself in my work-and I survived! But, of course, this was not my only reason for my feelings of pride and accomplishment.