This is the thread where we curse cancer.

colin, there isnt anything i can say. because i dont know how to fight this, i dont know how to fight disease, i dont know how to fight loss. i dont know how to deal with something that is as impassive and cold and random as disease. but i wish i did

Note to all past, present, and future ilxors: avoid Interweb ultimatums whilst grieving.

In 1972 I was given three months to live when I was diagnosed with a childhood cancer with a 97 per cent kill rate which had settled in BOTH kidneys and was brushing up against my lungs, too. I was given surgery, radiation and chemo and turned up for my first day of school in a wig. Whenever I go in for an X-ray or something, the radiologists and attending physicians freak out because you can still see the surgical staples around my kidneys, and when I tell them why they do double-takes which reinforce to me how lucky I am to be alive. Not a day goes by where I don't have a rage moment about the way cancer is diagnosed and treated in so-called developed countries; in fact I'm having one of those RIGHT NOW.

I cling to the fact that people like my friend Heather are willing to spend hour upon under-funded hour growing tumours in jelly to get a few steps closer to really saying fuck you.

KANCA BUN DAT FASS, SEEN

yeah, fuck it. so sorry to hear of your friend's death, colin.

And my best friend died a year ago from breast cancer. She was hardly Mrs High Risk - she lived the healthiest lifestyle of anyone I know, full of organically home-grown vegetables and lots of exercise. But she died anyway, painfully, tearfully, bloated from the steroid treatment she was subjected to - leaving behind a bewildered and desolate husband and two little boys who are so young they will probably never actually remember their mother.

So yes, I'm angry. It's good to rail against this terrible disease, to shout and cry and pound your fists into the pillow at the awful unfairness of it. Letting anger out helps to make you feel better. I just wish it could bring our loved ones back, too, because I'd give anything to be able to have that happen.

I know you don't want cyber hugs, but I'm sending them to you anyway Colin. And to anyone else who needs one right now.

To Cancer: Fuck you, you fucking fuck! May you spontaneously combust and your genes die out!

But a father still lost a daughter, two sisters lost a third sister, and a husband lost a wife before she even had a chance to become a mother. It happened 18 months ago but it doesn't go away - still dominates my entire life.

Colin, it stinks and it stinks and it stinks. You know I know how it feels, you've read CoM, you've seen the M&L threads here - I will try and email you if I can find a moment. Or just email me. Rant away as voraciously as you want. It's what needs to be done.

(I just re-read my ILE posts abt Laura's illness - my writing looks so damned clinical, so matter-of-fact. It belies what was going on inside me)

After about five years in remission I stopped going for yearly inpatient week-long batteries of tests. After about 10 years I stopped going for outpatient one-day batteries of tests. You're considered in remission until you've been free of cancer for 20 or 25 years. I don't worry about it coming back, but I don't allow myself overexposure to sun in high summer.

My mum has had it twice over the last 10 years but knock on wood will remain in remission.

Troubling is how you've said, it's herditary and mh, I only have one brother, who's always been able to skip the illness in our family ( only I inherited my father's phlegmatic temperament - we get colds too often! - apparently). But I'm ready, after all those scientific peopole should be doing something about this cancer thing by 2040, hopefully!!

But yeah, cancer. Fuck you, you miserable bastard. And to those of you who have also been negatively affected by this terrible thing, my sympathies, condolences, well wishes, admiration, etc.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ihqc81HK1rphf7io1_1280.png

:(

also thinking good thoughts for you Dr

good thoughts to you Morbs :)

my friend who was diagnosed (I must have talked about it on the other "fuck cancer" thread) is doing very well on chemo, nothing detectable in his lymph any more. fingers crossed.

Good luck and good vibes to you, Morbs.

Good luck, Morbs.

Close friend was just diagnosed with prostate cancer after he went for blood tests on a whim. They showed a PSA of 10 and when he went for the appointment with the consultant following biopsy, found that he's a 7 on the scale where 6 is mild and 10 is 'write a will' - does anyone have a clue what kind of outlook this gives a guy in his mid-60s?

Gleason scale: "A score of 2 to 4 means the cells still look very much like normal cells and pose little danger of spreading quickly. A score of 8 to 10 indicates that the cells have very few features of a normal cell and are likely to be aggressive. A score of 5 to 7 indicates intermediate risk."

I'd look into Dr. Ornish's lifestyle interventions if he's just in the active surveillance rather than surgery stage, and even thereafter. Better in prevention, but never too late to buy some time.

My good thoughts are with you too, morbz

This guy only has the odd glass of wine at, say, Christmas and has never smoked. NOT FAIR. xp

Good luck, Morbs. Fingers crossed.

suzy, I don't understand all the implications of the number scale, but lots of men live a long while with "watchful waiting" on p.c.

(tho maybe 7 is too high for hands-off)

my Dad was diagnosed over 10 years ago, and his PSA count has been v. low ever since he finished treatment. as cancers go, the outlook is pretty positive if you catch it early

My dad was diagnosed last spring and his doc said if men live long enough, they all get p.c. In fact it seems like every older man he's friends with already has a history--when he started talking about it, he found everyone else had it too. Otoh my mother said he's struggling because he's "not a man anymore" which I tried to redirect to "Of course he's still a man, that wasn't the only thing making him 'a man' his whole life!" but she wasn't having it. So their home life sounds like fun...but he should be alive to make her miserable for decades to come.

thinking good thoughts for you morbs, and for daddy laural too!

Thanks, everyone. I think it's an early catch, myself. He only told me because of my own past oncological issues and we haven't even discussed any ED issues that might (sorry) arise because, y'know, old-fashioned older English person.

He's got an MRI on Thursday and another consultation for the results in a week, at which point they'll discuss what form treatment/surgery will take. I'm forbidden to tell mutual friends who might fawn over him or pontificate on cancer-related "hippie rubbish." Right now, he's got a really good case of the 3AM heebie-jeebies about it all, but who could blame him?

thinking of you morbs and suzy.

fuck cancer.

This guy only has the odd glass of wine at, say, Christmas and has never smoked. NOT FAIR

Smoking appears to increase risk by 25-90%, depending on the study/smoking level. On the other hand, there's little association with alcohol intake, though each glass of red wine weekly may reduce risk by 6%.

Biopsy & autopsy studies demonstrate that around 25-50% of older men, even with low PSA, have undiagnosed prostate cancer, and some have argued that the likelihood rises to 100% by age 100. There's evidence that dairy consumption, particularly in adolescence, markedly increases prostate cancer risk (the association is comparable or greater than that for smoking), while consumption of eggs and poultry-with-skin markedly increases risk of progression to lethality after diagnosis. The incidence rate around the world varies some 20-fold, correlating pretty strongly with dairy and other animal product consumption, so a research focus over the past decade has been elucidating how some dietary proteins increase systemic and intracellular growth signalling, turning subclinical prostate (and other) cancers that most will get into diagnosable tumors. More here. There's actually a pretty strong scientific background to much of the "hippie rubbish".

^^ do you have a link for that?

Prostate ca incidence is disproportionately affected by diagnostic measures (use of PSA, timing and extent of biopsy), because of the high prevalence of occult disease (in the pauci- or asymptomatic). The countries that have been the most aggressive in attempting to diagnose clinically obscure cases of prostate ca have the highest incidences, but that's a function of their testing, not the disease. That they also have a high rate of dairy consumption is arguably the product of their societal level of wealth, even if dairy products themselves don't have a huge effect on carcinogenesis.

Age is also a confound, with wealthier societies having more older men (in part because of more successful prevention and treatment of diseases that kill middle aged men, like trauma and heart disease), who are predisposed to developing prostate ca regardless of their diet (except in the sense that the vast majority of them were raised in that same wealthier society, with higher rates of dairy consumption among other variations).

The health / quality of life of the patient at a given age is another factor that's hard to control for in an observational study -- a 73 year old with urinary hesitancy is much more likely to get diagnosed with non-metastatic prostate ca if he's otherwise healthy and has access to insured medical services than if he's impoverished and dying from COPD.

Absolutely early detection has seen incidence rates skyrocket while mortality remains pretty flat, and different medical cultures may influence diagnoses rates (eg, the "French paradox" of high fat & low CVD resulted from Drs entering fatal heart attacks/strokes as "sudden death" on death certificates). The 20:1 ratio in incidence seen here & here is probably affected by these, but its harder to fudge the 5:1 ratio in mortality rates between Scandanavia and rich Asian countries like Singapore & Japan. (Japanese immigrants to the U.S. have similar rates to other Americans).

The studies associating various proteins to prostate cancer, however, aren't this kind of transnational comparison, they're prospective cohort and retrospective case-control studies done in single countries with presumably similar technology and medical culture. For example, thisthis, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this are among the prospective and case-control studies linking dairy & prostate cancer. Not a huge effect, ranging from 20-60%, but consistent enough for a huge amount of benchtop work on what mediators may be involved, like IGF-1 and mTOR

Different medical cultures clearly do (not "may") influence diagnosis rates of prostate ca. Their effect is the biggest driver of the worldwide variation in epidemiology. The 2008 review you cite says as much --

The clinical incidence, mortality, and to a lesser degree prevalence of prostate cancer varies among various geographical regions of the world. The approach to screening, early detection initiatives, and availability of treatment modalities has a major impact on disease epidemiology. The differing role of genetic and environmental factors in prostate cancer carcinogenesis is yet to be elucidated.

-- and says nothing in particular about diet, not even mentioning dairy in the article (they do suggest that a Mediterranean diet may be protective, but that speculation doesn't make it to their conclusion.

Yet you said the 20-fold variation in worldwide diagnosis was "correlating pretty strongly with dairy and other animal product consumption", which isn't an accurate summary at all.

Of the many studies you listed as "this" without organizing or presenting their conclusions:
-- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008823601897 : this is from 1998

-- http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/4/549.short : this is from 2001, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (not quite the NEJM), and the effect size is 30%, awfully small considering they only adjusted for 4 confounds

-- http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/5/1147.short: this is based on data from the 80's, also in the AJCN

-- http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/166/11/1270.short : this is the first paper you've offered from the last decade, and the first from a journal I've heard of, and it contradicts your argument: "Although the authors cannot definitively rule out a weak association for aggressive prostate cancer, their findings do not provide strong support for the hypothesis that calcium and dairy foods increase prostate cancer risk."

-- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1011256201044: this is data from the 80's and 90's, and again the results are not what you're saying: "Intakes of total meat, red meat, and dairy products were not associated with risk of total or advanced prostate cancer."

-- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10552-006-0082-y: this supports your conclusion -- "Higher intake of dairy foods but not calcium was positively associated with prostate cancer." but they didn't find a trend for dose ("There was no association across tertiles of dairy or calcium with total prostate cancer"), which makes me wonder if that was a statistical artifact

-- http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/12/2623.short: this reports a "weak association" with CI crossing 1 -- "Greater intake of dairy products, particularly low-fat dairy products, was weakly associated with increased risk of prostate cancer [relative risk (RR), 1.12; 95% confidence intervals (CI), 0.97-1.30", which would be better reported as "not significantly associated". Even if you take that as a real finding and not statistical bias, their relative risk was 12%, not 20-60%, and that was fully found in non-aggressive forms of prostate ca (meaning, those being over diagnosed).

-- http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/17/4/930.short: this is the first study you've linked that I'm actually impressed with, though the fact that they found only 329 cases in 45,000+ men over 7.5 years shows that prostate ca either hardly exists in Japan or else they don't spend much time or energy looking for it

-- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.22553/full: this is a strong study, but their conclusion is that calcium, not dairy products per se, is harmful -- "no association with total dairy intake remained after we adjusted for calcium (p trend = 0.17)."

-- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pros.1087/abstract: this is another old study, again reaching the opposite conclusion to what you suggest -- "Our results do not support an association between calcium and the risk of prostate cancer."

-- (you posted this link twice) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=926760: this is another small study, drawing conclusions on only 69 incident cases diagnosed over 8 years. They again find calcium more dangerous than dairy products "Our data support the hypothesis that dairy products have a harmful effect with respect to the risk of prostate cancer, largely related to Ca content."

-- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0215(19990301)80:5%3C704::AID-IJC13%3E3.0.CO;2-Z/full#tbl4 : this is a case-control study, and the association they find between dairy consumption and prostate ca again crosses 1 in their CI, and should therefore be considered statistically non-significant

So that's a big pile of nothing much. And by the way, IGF-1 and mTOR are major targets of research for many better reasons than their supposed relationship to dairy consumption.

...

To step back from this a bit, this is a thread for an emotional reaction to a devastating disease. In my experience as a clinician dealing with people with terminal diagnoses, the reaction you quoted -- "This guy only has the odd glass of wine at, say, Christmas and has never smoked. NOT FAIR" -- is very common, very understandable, very human. To start with that and head down a rabbit hole of overly confident conclusions based on weak evidence of dietary factors affecting cancer diagnosis is not helpful, and may actually be taken as blaming.

You may feel better, looking up 20 year old articles in nutrition journals, and thinking that your dietary choices will protect you from death and destruction, or at least help you shave the odds in your favor. If that makes you feel better, go for it. But I would actively discourage you from bringing that kind of thinking back to this thread again, especially since your confident statements turn out to be based on weak and even contradictory scientific evidence.

If you'd like to take this up in any more detail, we could start a thread about nutritional effects on health and disease, and carry on the debate there.

Thank you, Plasmon. Cancer really doesn't give a fuck what you drink or eat or smoke - it can happen whatever you do, whoever you are. Obviously, certain habits don't exactly help. I'm trying to keep my friend away from possibly-spurious studies, 'hippie shit' and the like. I'm trusting his luck in being treated at the UK's best hospital for prostate cancer (a world leader in oncology in a science-university town) and he's hoping it's not so urgent that he has to have an op now, as opposed to waiting until after the summer/harvest season on which his work depends. Tuesday is news day, so...

Best of luck, Morbs

Best of luck, Morbs. Allow me to offer you 25 links why.

irl lol

I lost another uncle the other week. He was a drinker and a smoker. It still didn't seem fair.

sorry onimo, that's how a few of my mom's brothers went.

on the bright side, my new steroids came on time in the mail, just in time for beach season.

Kick some sand in cancer's face.

My friend's tumour is contained within the prostate and hasn't spread lymph-ward, so he's having an operation some time in the next month. This is going at a clip on the NHS. Already making jokes about going off half-cocked, so prognosis must be OK.

Lost a uncle (not super-close, lived in Germany) to lung cancer a couple of weeks ago. Heavy smoker. I remember him most from how he looked in the 70s: what happens when the man on the Mastermind game box settles down to a life of German entrepreneurship. Would have liked to met him as an adult.

This July I am once again participating in the Pan Ohio Hope Ride for the American Cancer Society. It's a 4-day bicycle ride from Cleveland to Cincinnati (328 miles) to raise money for the ACS Hope Lodges in those cities. If you aren't familiar with the Hope Lodges, they provide free lodging and support for cancer patients seeking treatment far from home. The Cleveland lodge hosts up to 31 patients, most seeking treatment at the world-class Cleveland Clinic or Case Western Reserve University Hospitals. The Cincinnati lodge hosts up to 22 patients. These places are a real blessing - when my dad was being treated for throat cancer in Baltimore, he stayed at the Baltimore Hope Lodge and saved himself a daily 100 mile round trip.

If you feel compelled to give, you can do so at http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?px=31631118&fr_id=61578&pg=personal . Donations go to the Hope Lodges right away, so anything you give helps cancer patients today.

geez guys :/

a friend of mine, who just turned 40, was diagnosed with what appears to be aggressive cervical cancer. she's been documenting her daily doctor's visits, posting her biopsy results, etc. on facebook, and she's handling everything with impressive coolness so far. all the same, motherfuck a goddamn cancer.

― half-worm inchworm tapeworm (donna rouge), Thursday, August 16, 2012 10:31 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this friend now has about a week and a half left, optimistically.

fuck you cancer fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you

― Rothko's Chicken and Waffles (donna rouge), Wednesday, November 13, 2013 9:21 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nearly a year and a half later from this last update: she's managed to hang on for awhile, well past that initial prognosis, but i was just informed by her boyfriend that she's now finally nearing the end - she's mostly unconscious and very weak

i hate cancer i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it

Nothing more useful to add, but man, fuck cancer.

seconded

thirded

fuck fuck fuck it

So sorry donna rouge. Hugs and strength to you, what a horrible thing.

Fuck you, cancer.

So sorry, Donna. Two of my friends are deep in the shit with this right now, and it makes me so angry.

I've been seriously entertaining the idea of cutting my very/too-long hair back to bob length, and donating the resultant 18 inches of cuttings to one of those charities that makes chemo wigs. Whoever gets it won't be forced to inappropriately resemble Carol Channing, as I did when I showed up to my first day of school having to wear one myself.

My favorite coworker. It's everywhere. She's a year younger than me, has three kids, got married last month.

Fuck cancer.

Oh Jesus, sorry to hear that, Kate.

My 8 year old second cousin was diagnosed with DIPG in January. Things have gotten really bad really quickly recently.

I am glad I got to meet her this summer, and that she and her family had a good time visiting New York. I am glad she got to see her baby cousins that were born last month.

I'm so sorry :(

Argh that's terrible - best wishes tr

Dang. So sorry to hear.

And now she's gone.

i'm so sorry

oh fuck, tokyo rosemary, that's awful.

a close friend of mine has had cancer twice, and he's gotten better, though his chronic health probs have progressively gotten worse over time. but he's just himself, he gets out of the hosp and shrugs it off, he's just my friend. last time he had chemo, he still visited me (i'm chronically ill and don't get around well myself)

recently, we were joking about his liver and how if it turned out the biopsy said he had cancer again, he'd totally ace the disability re-evaluation! silver lining! i was worried, but he's always gotten better. and he's always so zen about it.

this time he won't get better. it's slow, he'll be around for a while, i hope, fuck i hope, but this scares the shit out of me. he's my oldest friend, he was my bf a decade ago, he is an amazing dear friend and i don't know how to even cope. i knew he was going to get sicker, and not be around as long as most--but i figured he'd get an organ transplant, have various other probs, and just keep going, the way he does.

he emailed me about all this, which was a good choice, because i've been sobbing and cursing ever since.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/health/harnessing-the-immune-system-to-fight-cancer.html

My gorgeous cousin, who is more like my sister than my actual sister, has a diagnosis of oestrogen-positive stage 4 breast cancer which is already setting up shop in her liver and maybe her pelvis. We’ll know more in two weeks. As far as the docs know, it’s treatable but not curable, so I’m hoping her boys (3 on Monday, and 7) get a few years. She is worried the younger one won’t remember her when he’s an adult. She is 43.

Fuck this fucking disease for the pain it has brought to me and my family, and fuck the guilt I am feeling for surviving it in my own childhood, just so I can live a life where all I can do is watch it pick off the people I love, one by one.

<3 suzy

That’s lousy, Suzy, much love to you and yours.

I’m on a bus from LA to San Diego and the truck next to me has a “FUCK CANCER” sticker in the back window.