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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

I would heavily disagree with this - it depends entirely on the cancer you get. If it's something slow growing that would take a decade plus to kill you, sure - just trying to treat it would be worse than letting it ride.

But my father died of cancer nearing age 80, (most likely mesothelioma, though we didn't do heavy tests as it was discovered late), and it was incredibly painful and miserable for him. He had fast growing tumors in his ribs, forcing bone to spike out and hit his lungs, the tumors that grew in his lungs caused constant pneumonia and kept leaving him unable to get enough oxygen to his brain to communicate for hours at a time.

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Would he have had a better time at 45 not seing you growing and missing 35 years of life?

I'm not saying it's good to get cancer when you're old, I'm just saying if you had the choice no one would chose to get it earlier.

Sure, but like - no one wants to die like that. It's horrible. He was begging us to let him die at the end.

I feel your pain, I really do, but I think you missed the point. In almost any metric, if you have to die, it is better to die after having lived a full life than it is to die young.

I used to believe this without a shadow of a doubt, but without the choice to go out on your own accord, I don't know if I do any more after what I saw.

Why don't you have the choice?

That sounds far better than dying at 45 unless you have an extraordinarily unpleasant life in the interim

I don't think I want to die in excruciating pain and confusion at any age, personally.

I think the original point was that cancer 80+ is better than cancer at 45, so you should still try to avoid habits that make it more likely earlier, even if the chances remain 100% at sufficient time scales

Of course not. But if you are given the choice of it at 45 or 80, which are you taking?

If I had to die like what I saw, to live to 80? I'd take quickly at 45, I think.

Fortunately this is a false choice.

I think 78 and fine is better than 45 and 80 in pain.

But in this country we are so adverse to giving someone agency over how their life ends.

Because it’s not good Business.

I don't understand what you think this conversation is about. It's not "die quick and painless at 45 or excruciatingly painfully at 80" it's just 45 or 80. Nobody said anything about excruciating pain except you.

Do you think your dad would prefer to die exactly the same way at 45 instead? No? Great, conversation over.

Maybe it’s that I have young kids, but even knowing my death at 80 would be horrible, I’d choose that over a painless death at 45 in a heartbeat. I’d beg and pray for that outcome.

Unfortunately a lot of us will die in comparable ways if we are lucky enough to get that old. My grandmother was healthy & mentally with it until stroking out in her garden one day at the age of 90. That is the best any of us can hope for and the reality will almost certainly be far more painful and prolonged.

No, I don't think most people die in excruciating pain.

It depends on mechanism, but many cancer patients do deal with a great deal of pain, especially near the end of the disease process. I am sorry for your experience. It is not uncommon.

It is inhumane that we don't offer every possible option to those who are suffering.

It is unfortunately a complicated situation that often doesn't have a perfect solution. Without trying to cover every possibl nuance, I'll just say that many end-stage patients have pain so refractory that sufficient doses of pain medication are effectively lethal. This is usually offered, but obviously not everyone accepts.

The truly sad cases are those in which the patient no longer has decision-making capacity and it falls on a family member to make such decisions. When you aren't the one experiencing the pain, it's much harder to weigh that decision rationally. This is why so many providers push patients to establish legal documentation of their end-of-life wishes.

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