The steep price tag of cancer treatment needs to continue to be a part of the national conversation, not just the patient-doctor one.
Interpretation
Cancer treatment costs should be openly discussed in society, not limited to conversations between patients and doctors.
Suleika Jaouad emphasizes the importance of bringing the conversation about the high costs of cancer treatment into the public sphere. She believes that these discussions shouldn't be restricted to private settings between patients and their doctors, but rather should involve society at large to foster awareness and understanding of the economic burdens of cancer care.
In practice
In a panel discussion on healthcare reform, this quote can highlight the economic aspects of cancer care.
After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.
Just a few years ago, at the age of 22, I learned I had an aggressive form of leukemia. I needed intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to save my life. Back then, my doctors told me that I had a 35 percent chance of surviving my transplant.
When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals.
I remember my first day of chemo as if it were yesterday, hanging up my favorite summer dress like an athlete retiring a jersey. Within a few weeks, my waist had shrunk to a double zero - the size it was when I was in the sixth grade. My cheek bones jutting out. Rings under my eyes. Skin the color of chalk.
In my darkest days in the oncology unit, I promised myself that if I ever got into remission one day, I would become a stronger, healthier and better version of my precancer self.
Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn't be more different.
Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.
If you want to prevent abortions, you make sure everyone has health care, a high school education and birth control. Not the exact opposite.
It is the duty of all papas and mammas to forbid their children to drink coffee, unless they wish to have little dried-up machines, stunted and old at the age of twenty... once saw a man in London, in Leicester Square, who had been crippled by immoderate indulgence in coffee; he was no longer in any pain, having grown accustomed to his condition, and had cut himself down to five or six cups a day.
You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can't get her to come and get them then they won't work.
Good health is about being able to fully enjoy the time we do have. It is about being as functional as possible throughout our entire lives and avoiding crippling, painful and lengthy battles with disease. There are many better ways to die, and to live.
Any illness is a direct message to you that tells you how you have not been loving who you are, cherishing yourself in order to be who you are. This is the basis of all healing.
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