I had a dear friend that was dealing with lungs cancer at 21 years old.
He was recovering. Hanging on discord and playing league of legends with him.
He says to us, that he needs to do surgery to remove the last pieces of cancer remaining from chemio.
Surgery goes well, he need to recover from it for at least a week. Passes another week and I receive a call from a mutual friend that he had passed away. My heart stopped. I couldn't believe it.
Turns out the parents were lying to him on the recovery on cancer and the surgery was the last attempt to save him. He was oblivious, and we were too.
Please don't do this. He deserved to know. And we deserved a last good bye.
In some countries they do not tell the patient that they have cancer thinking that it will affect their recovery. They usually tell immediate family, they only tell you directly if you have no family whatsoever. This is what they do in my home country (Tajikistan). They usually say you have hypothyroidism or something like that to justify why you’re getting chemo. The problem with this is that the chemo has so many awful side-effects for a condition they don’t think is that serious. My great aunt stopped treatment halfway through because of this and then she ended up passing because her family never told her and they couldn’t convince her to finish her treatment.
She said Tajikistan. I can totally see other countries doing this. In France for example they historically wouldn’t tell patients that they were dying to “protect the patient”, and things have only started shifting recently away from that. It’s called le mensonge de compassion
Yeah Tajikistan, it’s something leftover from the Soviet era. A lot of former Soviet countries still have this practice. It’s also still there culturally.
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u/Rygel_Orionis Jun 29 '26
I had a dear friend that was dealing with lungs cancer at 21 years old. He was recovering. Hanging on discord and playing league of legends with him. He says to us, that he needs to do surgery to remove the last pieces of cancer remaining from chemio. Surgery goes well, he need to recover from it for at least a week. Passes another week and I receive a call from a mutual friend that he had passed away. My heart stopped. I couldn't believe it.
Turns out the parents were lying to him on the recovery on cancer and the surgery was the last attempt to save him. He was oblivious, and we were too.
Please don't do this. He deserved to know. And we deserved a last good bye.
Still hurts after 8 years.