Very soon, Senator McCain is going to be releasing his medical records. He’s had bouts with cancer… There may also be some record of his recovery after being a prisoner of war many years ago.
To the older generation, a cancer diagnosis of any kind in any person was cause for great alarm, as cancer used to be whispered about as ‘the big C” long ago and was considered a certain death sentence.
Back then, often the docs doing exploratory surgery and finding metastasized cancer, didn’t even tell the person they had cancer. Often all the family could say afterward was that the doctor opened the person up, closed them up, and said Take them home and make them comfortable.
When I go to my hematologist who is also in the main, an oncologist, and as I sit there for my intravenous infusions for chronic anemia, I am surrounded by people receiving chemo for cancer. I have heard enough of their brave and fierce stories to know that there are a million stories to cancer, many kinds of cancer, and many different kinds of outcomes– including legions of long term survivors who outlived all their peers.
But what stands out most is a shift to a new and different attitude in current cancer fighters and survivors … one different than their elders. It’s summed up in the big buttons my doc gives out. The buttons say, CANCER SUCKS! One of my favorite old women who sits near me getting her chemo, wrote with magic marker under that phrase, her own: CANCER IS A FREELOADER: KICK ITS ASS OUT!
The drugs and intervening means we have today are far advanced of what used to be. Cancer is not a death sentence, but certainly a loud announcement that things hang in the balance, and a patient must decide to intervene in ways they see fit, right now. Not, later.
Yet, cancer appears to have become practically as common in the US, as the flu– albeit far more serious. The reasons why so many are afflicted by cancer is, despite tons of money poured into research, still an open question in many persons’ minds. We wish we understood its epidemic better. Yet, there are also a quantum number of persons walking around hale and fit, who have had cancer, or who have had two or more remissions.
So, with the important caveat, that no one can crystal-ball anyone’s longevity by looking at medical records and making generalizations, especially about 5 and 10 and 20 years survivors of cancer… still, in my mind as an analyst, before Senator McCain’s records are released, there are about 6 preliminary questions (the rest will be better answered when we see content and scope of records, and Q and A from/with his physicians)
1. Are these redacted records, summations, or the full ‘as-written’ accounts? This is important to know only because redacted or summarized records can give the appearance that it is a pick and choose process about what to place emphasis on, or not… what to put in, what to leave out.
2. Why has it taken so long to release the records? Some will question whether the records have been edited by the Senator, because it seems to have taken so long to release the records publicly.
I don’t know about you, but when I quit a doc I’d had for 20 years and requested my records, it took many months and when they finally did arrive, they turned out to be about 6 inches of pages. Lots of standing at the Xerox machine, I guess. Some of what was in my records was inaccurate. Some was weird speculation by a young stand-in doc. Some… I’m laughing… was completely illegible (this was before docs had transcriptionists, or as now, often docs type their record-comments straight into their laptops).
3. Are these physicians who will be available to answer questions (three of them, as reported by news agencies) the ones who actually treated you; the primary planners of your treatment?
4. Have each of the three docs been briefed but also restricted about what can be answered, or are they free to answer any reasonable question about Senator McCain’s health that the public might have?
5. What is thetime frame in terms of years that bracket the records which are being released, e.g., will you also be releasing medical records about your recovery during the years after being released from being a POW?
6. And just a general question to the people: Will all other candidates for President and Vice President also be pressed to open their medical records, likewise?
No doubt lots of other people have other questions.
Although I loathe the idea of rifling through someone’s sensitive life story that ought under normal circumstances belong to them only…. I also think Senator McCain is fierce to release what most of us consider intensely private information. Does anyone really want other people to know about their frailties of body, or the time they needed meds to sleep after their mother died, or how they got through the gleeping glotch, or any of their cough cough, um, you know, private challenges with whatever? It takes guts to open one’s health story to anyone; those who receive it with respect, and those few who want to spin it into some other shape.
Yet, it stands clear that people want to know a fellow in position to be running for POTUS is pretty hale insofar as can be.
Which incidentally, has nothing to do with age. Heredity, racial bloodline, environs, what one ingests– all these can conspire to hide something adverse in the body– e.g., Tay-Sachs disease, Sickle-cell, Diabetes Type II, arterial thinning or thickening, a hidden heart weakness. These disorders and other buried conditions– or known ones– can take a person to their knees, no matter their chronological age.
….and as to how much one can really draw fit conclusions from medical records, some folks, you and I know for sure, question past and present President’s fitness to govern, despite what their med records say now, before, or ever…
Stay tuned.
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CODA
Reading your own med records can be hilarious…. remembering what the doc said to you, and what the doc actually wrote in the record, sometimes don’t match up. I recommend all persons request their written med records (unredacted) if they’d like to know what the doc was really thinking about their owies and health challenges over time. (When I first read my medical records, I with some levity, wanted to sue the doc for calling me “a pleasant woman of unremarkable appearance.” I resent being called “pleasant.” (“Pleasant person of unremarkable something or other,” used to be the way old fashioned docs were taught to open a statement about a female patient. Unless of course, they were like my grandmothers and aunts, in which case, the record probably said, “Stubborn, hard-headed, smart allecky, impossible woman.”)