nuwbs

My mother had ovarian cancer stage 4 and it became a bit a battle of faith. My mother saw herself as a nun (never remarried after my father and her divorced when I was 2), meditated/chanted rosaries for 8ish hours a day and I became a scientist. When she got diagnosed I figured she'd go through the chemo but she figured she'd.. well... go more faith based. She went to India (the religion I was raised in) and tried to cure herself with the help of well.. charlatans or holy men, depending on your angle. The rest is to be expected and ended with an old school wooden raft and fire on the Ganges.

Either way, your story is one I empathize with and it definitely brought me back. I hope you're doing well.

I love this point because this seems to be happening everywhere (academia, for example) where professors are "supervisors" by name only and mostly just lab managers. The attempt at streamlining and appealing to the lowest common denominator has made us lose the human touch of mentoring and I'm not sure how we ever get there again.

I can't say I remember too much by now about the type, 5 years have gone by in a blink. The plan was to do chemo -> surgery -> chemo. I'm also not sure what the chance of success (however defined) was. At the heart of it was a very strange tension of faith vs science and this much I reflect on a lot. While it was clear she didn't want to die I find a bit of solace in knowing she did it in a way that made sense to her (maybe this is weird to read but faith was a very big part of her personality).

Unfortunately maybe I'm a bit too close to science and it's made me fairly... jaded. Part of their job is to sell hope (in whatever form this takes... technological hope, life-saving hope, increased efficiency hope) both to the public and to the grant issuers. I certainly hope nothing but success to your world-renown expert in whatever incremental hope he's... hoping for.

My mother had done 1 session of chemo (probably due to my insistence) and said it felt like death. She was set to do weekly chemo sessions every Friday. I was doing my masters at the time and I had called, knowing her session was at 2 pm, to ask what room she was going to be in so I could come and be with her. She insisted that I should just finish off my work day instead, etc. I found this a bit strange so I made it clear I was going to be there. She broke down crying and passed me to her friend who told me that my mother had decided to not do chemo anymore. My heart sank... What do you even say to this? I let loose on this woman knowing she had played a supportive role in my mothers decision and told her that whatever happened to my mother I would hold her responsible.

After trying a bunch of non-sense home cures - to name a few: maple syrup and baking soda, a lemon juice detox (a lot of this non-sense based on alkali body stuff) and at one point ingesting diuted hydrogen peroxide - she decided to go to Chennai to do a fresh cow-milk cure. When that didn't work, she went to the holy city of Vrindavan to stay in a hospice... The rest is history, as they say.

I don't mean for it to come across as weird death porn but, rather, to give a bit more grounding and context to what you said about choices and sense of agency. She had gone once, for me, to do something she didn't believe in and hated the feeling of. Very quickly you're forced to learn some very big life lessons. In sanskrit they call this saranagati (surrender), though the serenity prayer is also something that bounces around in my head often. You realize that, in this moment, you'd rather have a relationship than yell about who's possibly right; you'd rather show love and support for a decision you absolutely don't believe in because it's what the other person needs. Looking back it all feels a bit surreal, still. What a wild ride.