Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamsiem | Hacker News Reader

My mother had immunotherapy treatment last year for lung cancer. It caused a lethal arrhythmia within 24 hours that they could not treat. She was dead by the end of that day. The cardiologist said this was a known side effect (he muttered 5% as she lay there). It's still not a perfect solution.

View on HN

To be fair, not knowing your mother's age or cancer, 5% is right around the mortality rate for major surgery in the elderly too. Things are just dangerous as you approach end of life and there are no good solutions for anything.

What are the odds of chemo sucking every moment of joy out of your life and then you die anyway.

I think I could deal with 20:1 odds if I had a clean before and after. Tell everyone you love them, hope to see them soon, then take your 95% chance of having an extra few years.

That's pretty much what happens when you get a stemcell transplant. Luckily there is steady improvement in the survival rate. This is a very old therapy by now of course. But let's hope the various form of immuno therapy take the same trajectory, getting a little better every year.

Hank Green just did a follow-up about a question about “who has the most DNA”, where he back pedaled heavily on his previous attempt to answer.

I learned, as he had, that sometimes bone marrow transplants don’t take and one option is to administer another, or several, which could make you much more chimeric than the average stem cell recipient. But I don’t understand how the marrows don’t end up fighting each other in a death match. Is that a special property of marrow?

I'm really sorry for you loss (and the way it happened).

That said, we all know that these are not perfect solutions. They save some more, they don't save all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com