Saturday, July 20, 2013


Friend Ark commented on "Reader Discretion is Advised" and said:

I'm impressed how brave you're being

A lot of people have sent me messages telling me how brave and courageous I am. I appreciate the sentiments, but from my point of view I feel neither brave or courageous.

Both of those involve making a choice to perform an act because its benefits outweigh its consequences. A person might choose to enter a burning building to rescue someone because they perceive the saved life to be worth more than the injuries (or death) the rescuer might experience.

On purely technical grounds, I have made such a choice. I have chosen to try to go on living with my wife and children at the cost of undergoing barbaric cancer treatment. But really, would any of you consider that a true choice?

The only alternative is to decide not to seek treatment and just let the cancer kill me, abandoning my family. And also, by the way, choosing a pretty gruesome death unless I decided to take a shortcut.

Big Sister tells me that many people do make the choice not to treat cancer. But they are mostly quite elderly and they make the calculation that they could have perhaps a year of feeling good before they decline versus a year of feeling crappy in treatment with perhaps the same outcome. But that is a far different choice than mine.

So I do not feel brave for having chosen to undergo treatment. And as you can tell from my recent whinging about the experience, I don't feel especially courageous about enduring treatment. I feel grimly determined to drag my ass through it because the desired outcome - watching my children grow up and then growing old with Wonderful Wife - is so valuable.

In my moral world there was no choice.


  1. But did you ever know that you're my hero? Seriously.

  2. I am very happy to hear that you have set clear goals and that they appear to be realistic in your case. They are, however, only realistic as long as you decide to believe that the alternative to accepting the side effects piling up is so much worse than those side effects. Having personally gone through Cisplatin and 5FU "Cures" and then some, I contend that there is still some bravery involved.

    1. Hi marlang,

      I'll accept that!

      I have a new post about bravery brewing in my head. It has a lot of backstory so it might end up being a series of posts.