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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

My Mom was diagnosed with two kinds of stage III lymphoma just after Christmas last year. She started chemo a few months ago. Three treatments in, all of the tumors were no longer visible in a PET scan.

I'm still trying to emotionally accept that the nightmare is over. It seems almost too easy, like it's just setting us up to let us down. It can come back, of course. But she's in remission now and totally done with treatment.

Whenever I think of oncologists, I always imagine how much it must suck to tell people they have cancer every day. I'd never really considered the other side of that. To get to tell someone you have completely cured them of a disease that would surely have killed them. It must be an incredible feeling, like beating Death at his own game.

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I imagine the joy is tempered by the lack of 100% confidence. "Your cancer is gone...but we really can't say that it won't reappear, because we can't say if ALL the cells are gone, they are just too few for our technology to see. So go forth and be joyous and I definitely won't be nervous that this all turns out to be false hope that results in you back here again, feeling doubly betrayed".

This is true of any cancer treatment. You're never cured of cancer. You just go into remission. The 5 year mark has historically been the point when complete remission is deemed a cure, but that doesn't mean recurrence is impossible.

Even then, don't oncologists highly recommend an annual screening for the rest of your life?

Periodically, I think. I don't know how often. Unfortunately, everybody I know who has had cancer is no longer around.

I don't know about other cancer types but around here they do that for non-hodgkin-lyphoma. The first two years after remisson the screening is every 3 months. Year 3-4 every 6 months and year 5+ once every year.

At the limit though this argument works for broken legs too. Oh sure the leg seems better now, but it could break again. I think with a broken leg you'd accept that's just a different break, even if it's the same leg.

I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma many years ago, in my final follow up they said the radiation damage means there's a higher than normal chance I'd get some entirely different cancer later in life, but as to Hodgkin's there's no difference from the rest of the population. If I get Hodgkin's again it isn't because the treatment stopped working, it just means the same or similar freak DNA change happened. Like if I broke the same leg again.

There was a thread on reddit a while back asking cancer survivors what the worst part of it was. One person said that when they got diagnosed, it brought a black cloud into their family that will never leave. Even in remission, it will always be there in the back of the minds of their loved ones, forever.

I understand this personally but I temper those thought by the fact that anyone can be killed randomly by anything at anytime. So live each day regardless.

A creature can not live with this realization not supressed. You cant take credit. You cant have a loved one go on a journey alone. If you where fully aware of you mortality, you would cower in a bonker like a nomad crab in its shell. Maybe one would storm outside from time to act in fits of panic.

And yes, those edgy adults, claiming to be aware of death/mortality and accpeting, usually have created lightning rods in theire conciousness for these fears.

Like believe systems, that reroute this fear into believe of immortality, or in the atheist case a feeling of superiority for living your life to the max, while all those others do not. Those fully aware are in asylums

Yep. Last year my mom's cancer returned two years after she was told she only had an 8% chance of recurrence. She's at least lucky in that it's apparently a non-aggressive type that can be treated with meds that have minimal side effects. Unlucky, however, since (barring new treatment options) she'll need to continue treatments for the rest of her life.

Just like a weather forecast, the prediction was right. Your mom just happened to be one of those 8 people who get it out of every hundred. Doesn't feel like it though.

Best of luck to her.

Thanks. Yep, her oncologist's words were "unfortunately someone always has to be in the 8%."

My mom had small cell lung cancer 10 years ago. She died in about 4 years, there was no immuno-therapy available for her then. This kind of thing is a miracle. It's another sign for those that need them that we do get payoff for decades of cancer research. It's really why we need to support fundamental research. We have put a lot of resources into cancer, will we be able to apply them to other areas, or move funding over eventually? Many kind of psychological issues are thought to have significant brain functioning causes or at least impacts, I hope we can eventually make similar progress there. Or on diabetes or whatever.

I'd have given anything to help mine. I'm happy your mom was able to get that treatment.

This is also why we should have low marginal tax rates, including for the wealthiest. Immuno-therapy tech was basically angel invested by Facebook's Sean Parker https://www.parkerici.org/our-model/ It is important for society to have significant resources outside of the control of politicians and bureaucracies.

True, but I imagine they have to say the former dramatically more often than the latter.

Imagine in the near future [+] when telling someone they have cancer is the same as telling them they have strep throat: a minor inconvenience. We're still in the dark ages of treating cancer (ie radiation, chemo, and surgery).

[+] 20-30 years

In 30 years we'll all be too busy looking for dry land.

No shit. Extra bonus if it has any usable topsoil left...

We'll be eating genetically engineered meat. As in lab grown muscle tissue, no need to even raise and then kill a cow. We can use the land reclaimed from animal husbandry applications.

While this is probably (hopefully) an exaggeration, I think you're dead right. The downvotes seem reflective of a delusion in the tech community that we will find a technological solution to any and all of the global problems we are likely to face soon. I wish people were more concerned about this.

> The downvotes seem reflective of a delusion in the tech community

The downvotes seem reflective of the reality that the vast, vast majority of present landmass will be perfectly dry with a 10m rise in sea levels.

Climate change risks are bad enough. Hyperbole doesn't make it any scarier, and is unnecessary.

If you think sea level rise is the only problem and, if it were, you think 10m is not enough to lead to complete societal meltdown in some places, then we clearly need more hyperbole.

Even if the ice caps completely melt, finding dry land isn't going to be a problem. We'll have plenty of other problems, but that's not one of them.

You could be right; it's totally possible that in 20-30 years telling someone they have [antibiotic resistant] strep is the same death sentence as telling them they have cancer.

I'm not really sure. Many forms of cancer are treatable if detected early. The question is mostly around how early they are discovered. Certainly many kinds of cancer are more likely to be discovered when they are already advanced. :-(

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