Phyllis Bush is coping with cancer. She received the diagnosis six months ago. She meets each challenge as it comes.
In this post, she reflects on the latest twist of fate, thinking about the tragedy in Las Vegas.
How well I remember that sense of disproportion when my own 2-Year-Old child was dying of leukemia. He was in and out of the hospital six times, sicker each time, enduring dreadful treatments. About three months into this nightmare, a friend and her two children were killed instantly in a terrible car crash. One of the children was my son’s playmate.
There is no sense in any of this suffering. When bad things happen to good people, when the good die young, when tragedy strikes at the hands of a madman, don’t look for reason. There is none.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a reason and it was posted in what she said, he was a madman. And hospitals kill 200,000 a year with medical errors, 3rd leading cause of deaths in the USA. 1,688,780 cancer cases in the USA and over 400,000 deaths. 480,000 deaths from tobacco.
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Oh my. How poignant a personal response. Thank you for sharing, Diane.
Things happen, and sometimes there is a synchronicity that allows us a moment to reflect on the larger issues and ironies of life.
I don’t look for reasons in what human’s do. I can look for things that make it possible for loonies to do bad things, and one of them is that there is a secret government, a cabal of wealth that controls our legislators, and cares not a whit for the people, whom they see as servants. At the top of the pecking order are the DEATH MERCHANTS who keeps he world armed to the teeth, promotes the weaponization of our police and our citizenry, promotes hatred and violence, and ensures that our people do not know the real meaning of the second Amendment, or how our Congress betrays us.
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What a beautiful and inspiring message. I forwarded it to a nephew whose 5-year-old son is enduring treatment for leukemia.
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The good news is that the survival rate for childhood leukemia is now very high.
When my child had it, the survival rate was zero.
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My heart goes out to you and to all parents facing the loss of a child. I write this while my own child swims at practice. The thought of losing her strikes a kind of fear into me that seems distant and foreign.
In history, people lost children a lot. I was recently in a graveyard and noticed how many children were buried there. I did a review of the 1900 census in our county some years ago and found that 65% of mothers in our county had lost at least one child.
The ancient drama in the Book of Job suggests that it is all too complex for us to understand. True, perhaps, but small compensation for our humanity. Perhaps it is enough that we pass along that thing the ancient Hebrews called steadfast love.
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Impossible to imagine what you went through here. Horrific.
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So very sorry, Diane. You have compassion.
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I weep for you and that precious little boy, Diane. Our eldest son too died after an extended illness, hospitalizations and the rest. He was 23. All that future, extinguished. Unspeakable, watching your child suffer.
Roy, for a long time all I could read was Keats and Dickinson. They kept me better company, coming as they did from a time when early death from illness was far more common, and spoken about, and pondered.
They would have known, too, of the killing of dozens and maiming of hundreds in a 10-min ambush. Word would have reached them, eventually… from the battlefront.
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It is sad to see a loved one get ill and struggle with a chronic disease. What we have to remember is that each life is precious and that we each contribute to the betterment of mankind in various ways.
This beautiful lady is remarkable in her strength and persistence in making life better for all. She is a beacon of light in the darkness.
My best wishes and thoughts go with her and hope, God willing, that the remission she seeks comes, and soon.
I love the thought that we are all on a journey and we will all come to a time when the end comes near. May that be a time of reflection on a life well lived. On a life filled with ambitions that were filled and dreams that came true.
She is a beautiful lady. My best wishes are with her.
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So much of life is random and defies reason. Sometimes life’s surprises are great and funny. I just watched the premiere episode of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS with Dr. Henry Louis Gates where he traces the family histories of Bernie Sanders and Larry David. It is worth seeing!
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My wife had leukemia (the childhood kind but as an adult – known as ALL)
Her survival chances are slightly below 50% though we are now a few years out since initial diagnosis and still in remission.
I would never wish this ghastly disease on anyone – watching a loved one degenerate when their body can’t protect them from bleeding or disease any longer is beyond horrific.
Our prayers should be with the afflicted and their doctors, and please help fund research to combat it.
God speed Diane. There is no sense in these diseases.
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I definitely had to bookmark this piece for future reference. Yes, who knows what can happen. And, writing like this can be a lifeline.
I’ve sometimes wondered about a sort of “Best of Diane’s Blog” compilation. Although many of the entries are tied to the latest news, often the writing here is timeless.
Hang in there, Phyllis. Your positive attitude is an inspiration.
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John,
A small publishing house is compiling the best posts. I don’t have time!
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Great. I’m glad someone can lend a hand in that regard. There’s certainly a lot of writing to consider -many hundreds of thousands of views later.
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I have worked in cancer advocacy for almost 20 years. While there are many dire cases, a cancer diagnosis does not have to be a death sentence. And as I tell the patients I work with, a cancer diagnosis is not a tragedy; a child who dies after running into the street and gets hit bay car: that’s a tragedy.
For whatever it’s worth, here are some things that I think newly diagnosed patients need to do (and if you’re “experienced,” add the things you’re not doing to your checklist):
— take a deep breath
— don’t obsess about what might have caused your cancer
— get a second (and sometimes a third) opinion; more often than not a second diagnosis confirms the first and will give you more confidence in your treatment plan
— the less prevalent your type of cancer is, the more important it is for you to find a specialist and have them consult with your primary oncologist
— be sure to have a friend or loved one go with you to doctor’s appointments to take notes and be a second set of eyes and ears
— seek out respected advocacy organizations in your type of cancer to get specific information that applies to you; often the smaller they are, the better they likely are
— make learning about clinical trials a regular part of your treatment plan; join if you can or learn about upcoming trials that may fit you eventually; shed whatever myths you may have about them
— get a genetic profile of your disease to find out if you have any specific genetic features (translocations, deletions, additions) that might make you an subset of your type of cancer; all cancers are caused by genetic damage, whether it is inherited, caused by environmental causes, or of unknown origin; get updated profiles because your genetics may change after each type of treatment
— learn about support groups in your area focusing on your type of cancer; often experienced patients can educate you as much or more than your oncologist
— become friends with your nurses and medical technologists
— put Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies” on your reading list immediately and if you find it enlightening, then get his book “The Gene”
— make sure you have a lot of “me” time for yourself and your caregiver(s)
— remember that more cancers are becoming chronic conditions, that should be your goal, not a cure (yet)
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I would also suggest that anyone with cancerous tumors look into being treated by cyberknife. It was invented at Stanford and is a radial surgery that has 200 different rays that are programmed, by combining a MRI and CT scan, to go into tumors anywhere in the body. If the tumor hasn’t metastasized it might stop the tumor from growing and kill it.
It is a very procedure that does not require any type of cutting surgery. One lays on a bed with street clothes and the cyberknife machine will robotically work to hit the tumor.
There is a Cyberknife Cancer Institute in Chicago and some hospitals in every state have cyberknife. It is also widely used in many countries internationally. Google cyberknife for more information.
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When his friend Michele Besso, an engineer, died, Einstein sent this letter to his wife:
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
The letter suggests that Einstein believed that one consequence of his discoveries was that each moment was eternal. I used to live in Boston. I now live in Florida. Boston did not cease to exist because I am no longer there. Spatial continuity but not continuity of personal experience of those spaces. Likewise, Einstein thought, with time. The moment of your birth, the moment of your death, all there. This does NOT mean that free will is an illusion. These are different perspectives, from within time and from outside it, in a boat on the river seeing the bank on either side or in a space shuttle seeing the whole of the river at once.
If this is so, then one takes pause regarding what one is doing at this moment. LOL. Would I want to be flaming this guy on the Internet FOREVER? A variant of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Eternal, but not a return.
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Great comment.
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The maddening question is why I can return to Boston today but cannot return to Boston yesterday. Why does time, unlike space, have an arrow.
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One answer is that it doesn’t have an arrow. It just happens that at any place we are inhabiting in block time, we have access only to the now and to memories of the past. So, no arrow. However, a slight revision of that maddening question which is still, LOL, a maddening question.
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Huh, I read a big book about the nature of time a few years ago, and all I retained was that entropy mandates that time has an arrow. My memory itself being a great example of entropy and time’s arrow at work.
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You may find this interesting, FLERP. It’s a catena, or connected series of tidbits, that I put together of selected speculations, from across the centuries, about the nature of time. Interesting stuff:
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You can’t return to Boston yesterday because you’re too darn slow: speed things up quite a bit and you’ll be able to…
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