Recently, I received a letter from a former leukemia patient who recovered completely after treatment. Those who wrote in the letter clearly showed that we were wrong about many things that we thought we were doing right during the follow-up of the patients, and that Hippocrates, who said years ago, “There is no disease, there are patients,” is still right.
Dear Sevcan said in her letter;
“Nervous and stress are also mentioned among the causes of cancer in general. When you say ‘I have cancer’, people immediately assume that there is something you were upset about in the past and attribute it to it. Heh, here I am a patient created strictly as an antithesis for this thesis. You know, as if a patient had to be chosen in order to destroy this prejudice that has been going on for centuries, and they thought about who would not be the most upset, and it was as if I became that “me”…”
These sentences are treated with the advice of ‘keep your morale up’. It is as if it was written for the patients who are trying to be treated. The urge to “keep your morale firm” adds to the great trauma, distress, fear and anxiety experienced by the patients, as well as the anxiety of “I have to keep my morale firm”. None of the scientific studies on this subject have been able to convincingly show that the stress factor alone causes cancer, and those who are stressed respond worse to treatment.
This belief in our country, I don’t know why, but unfortunately it is very strong. For example, I don’t know if there is an expression in another language that says ‘you gave me cancer’.
However, patients diagnosed with cancer should be allowed to comfortably experience the trauma, sadness and anger they experienced at that time.
Let’s go back to Sevcan’s letter…
“I was introverted at that time. But that had nothing to do with my depression. Just when I thought I was going to experience my illness with the taste of “I will survive” by Gloria Gaynor, I suddenly found myself in the clip “I’m not down, I’m standing” by Mahsun Kırmızıgül.”
So, maybe Sevcan is trying to say that she could not go through this process without fear, as we expect from patients, with courage.
The words “You must be text, you must be brave” are among the most frequently spoken words to cancer patients. But is it that easy to be a text?
Dear Sevcan went through the illness process exactly the opposite of our assumptions and prejudices that “it should be so”.
His relationship with healthcare professionals and their evaluations show that we need to rethink everything.
“… for some reason he felt like a person I shouldn’t have met at the hospital. It was as if she was the sweet woman who, while waiting in line at the cash register, accidentally passed in front of me and then sacrificed her place when I realized it, saying ‘no, please come in’. Or, I don’t know, it could have been someone at D&R to whom we reached out for the same book and smiled slightly embarrassed… But he couldn’t have been someone who treated me in the hospital…
The clue why the doctor he was talking about couldn’t be his doctor was actually hidden in these sentences.
“We talked about Audrey Hepburn movies, when she saw my admiration, she compared me to Audrey Hepburn with my cortisone swollen potato face. At the time, the late Audrey Hepburn was probably turned over in her grave.
Isn’t the message clear? Don’t lie to me, no matter how much it hurts.
His feelings can of course be very “subjective”. However, what they wrote reminds us of the importance of “individual” differences, completely independent of the disease, that are hidden among the clinical, laboratory and radiological data, and sometimes we cannot see due to ‘professional deformation’ in medicine.
Today, even contemporary medical practices are being discussed again from this point of view. Of course, ‘evidence-based medical knowledge’ is important, but individual differences are just as important. There are some who say that there are drawbacks to starting from the general truths obtained by using the data of hundreds of patients, and that physicians should be like tailors who sew clothes, not those who sell clothes. Of course, being aware of the fact that it is not possible to be a good tailor without following the fashion, that is, without knowing the current developments.
Dear Sevcan and others like her have a lot to teach us in this working process. We must listen to what they have to say.
