“Doctors are not up at night crying” in fear of their next mammogram, Trisha Stotler Meyer, a 37-year-old woman who had a double mastectomy three weeks ago, told the Associated Press. “I don’t want to have to deal with the stress.”
I don’t blame her at all. It is amazing to me that people are still reduced to this sort of choice in the midst of all our med tech progress.
I don’t think that should be amazing. Medical progress comes one step at a time, not as a constant acceleration of elimination of all badness. If you look back even 20-25 years to where cancer treatment was then, I don’t think it’s fair to be “amazed” that it hasn’t reached a certain further point than it has.
Of course, I feel for that woman — it’s horrible to be in that kind of dread, and to be faced with a choice of either doing something so radical and maybe unnecessary, or living in fear of a lethal return of the disease. But I don’t think that it’s more amazing that we haven’t prevented recurrence of breast cancer, than that the survival rate of that and other cancers has increased hugely in recent decades.