No it isn’t, but there is some truth in it somehow.
These people have seen what cancer does up close and personal. In later stages, in terminal stages — when death is nearby. And it ain’t good.
My girlfriend is a urologist, and she actively attends the Multidisciplinary Oncology Consult meetings, where the participants discuss their cancer patients with colleagues. And I can tell you: death is part of the job, and so is pain and despair.
So when I told my girlfriend that I had met my ex-wife, who we knew had breast cancer in some undefined stage, and told her what I had seen, she wasn’t shocked at all.
My ex had been standing less than one meter away — this shadow of a person I once knew very well and loved — and now I could barely recognize her at all. The eyes were empty, the once so much praised hair was dead, the facial skin was pebbly, and its color was yellow. I think the shadow noticed me as well, but it lacked any emotion, as if it was beyond that.
And when I watched her while I was having a coffee and working on my portable, she barely moved. Gazing at her cell phone without seeing anything, because there was nothing left to see. She was waiting for her young son, who would be without a mother in a couple of months.
My girlfriend and her colleagues see such patients at a frequent (though luckily not daily) basis — patients who are beyond therapy, patients who are getting constricted in death’s cold embrace. Just like my ex-wife was.
And I think most of them won’t wait so long before making some proper arrangements, so that they can gracefully leave in peace, instead of rotting away as a ghost, and leave in a mist of excruciating physical and mental pain which even the strongest medicine cannot control anymore. Just like my ex-wife did.
When a patient is diagnosed in a terminally advanced stage of cancer, patients often are convinced that they are entering a fight, while the fight is actually already over.