Cancer Symposium

Yesterday I attended an excellent symposium at St. Joe's Hospital in Phoenix, AZ. It was a most informative event and vendors provided a lot of information relative to colon cancer, some of which I desperately needed. It was a reminder that the task of living with Cancer can be overwhelming. Not just the whole live or die thing but the tremendous amount of information needed to survive bills, insurance problems, and a bucket load of stuff you need but do not know where to go to get it. This type of event helps cut to the chase and saves me many hours of searching. I was, however, most disappointed that the medical field experts are quite excited about new technology that treats stage 1 through 3 Colon Cancer but writes off Stage IV (end stage) with treatment that basically keeps you comfortable and alive with Cancer until you die. The cutting edge treatments are not generally even considered for stage four and from the information I received, it seems there are some treatment options for Stage 3 that could be implemented in Stage IV. The symposium consensus pretty much said that life expectancy 20 years ago was about 4-6 months and now is wonderfully about 30 months. I am sorry but there is nothing wonderful about 30 months.....and no one is going to be allowed to offer me that.... I know that medicine is not faith based as a rule, but while I will allow medicine to do what they do to the extent they do it, I will not just sit back and accept some stats....there is a Higher Power than man and I know that my future depends on medicine, technology, me and that Higher Power. I will accept nothing less than a positive attitude towards recovery and nothing less than Positive Pursuits to that end. Thanks to St. Joe's Hospital for a great event but in thirty months I expect a vacation will be in order.
So there.................