Francesca Reigler
Thanks to Janice and Christine, who made all the arrangement including procuring all the necessities required for the blessing of Ken Rinpoche. It went on smoothly and ended with a dinner dana.
Today was really a bad day for me. For the first time, the water in herbs that I was boiling went dry, really dried so much so the whole steel pot was black in color. I was really off tangent and my mind was working ovetime so much so I forgot about the herbs until the beautiful burnt smell came!
The Art Of Dying
Almost every cancer patient's first contact is with the conventional medical profession. No matter which country your doctor is qualified from, they all preach the same things. If the patient have been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, well the answer is almost all the same, only the difference is how much time to live the patient has.
There are possibly three ways a cancer patient reacts. The first group is the doctors knows best. I have heard of stories that the cancer patient died exactly the same date as predicted by the doctor. Why not? If the patient listens to the doctor and thinks there is no hope, can the outcome be different? The patient has give up hope on living and the result is what you get.
The second group are those who plays safe. Try conventional first and when that cannot help, they go alternative. Sort of best of both worlds. But unknown to the cancer patient, much of the body has been poisioned by conventional treatment. For the first time a urologist admitted to me that chemotherapy is poison. I will not name him. But more often that not when the immune system is damaged by so much poison from conventional treatment, it takes a long long time for the body to even get back to the state before the start of the conventional treatment. I have personally seen so many go. Really sad.
The third group are those who go direct for alternative treatment. Brave souls some would say. But the problem with alternative therapies are there are so many to choose from. Which is the correct one? Though question but do know that no treatment, convetional or alternative can be 100% effective. So decide with care.
So how do cancer patient want to die? The art of dying is actually in the hands of the cancer patients themselves.
What I want to share about is the timeframe give by the doctors. When doctors give six months to live, what does that mean to the cancer patients? Where did the doctors get those statistics? If you look at medical literature, the scientific studies leave no room for doubt. This or that cancer are incurable. It then offers the median survival time of so many months.
As a cancer patient, what you should know is that there is no fixed rule to apply to everything in a fixed manner. You will have variations. The median is nothing more than an abstraction, a law that the human mind tries to impose on the diverse profusion of individual cases (Professor Stephen Gould).
For my case, my median survival given by my doctors is six months. This means half the population will die in less than six months while the other half will die more than 6 months. So the key to survial is to find yourself on the right hand side (tail end) of the distribution. So when the doctor pronounce the death sentence on the cancer patient, it does not mean that the patient will die within the time given. The cancer patient can live longer but only if he thinks otherwise. Understand this. I am a good an example. Of course, if the patient selects the appropriate therapy, the cancer patient can live even longer.
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