Day +48

I am fine today. I would like to continue my story...

The arrival of Pastor and my youngest brother helped me and my sister a lot. They helped to take care of me, pray for me and participated in many decisions related to my treatment. My wife was about 5 months pregnant at that time, so it was not convenient for her to stay in the hospital to take care of me. At that time many Christians in many churches started to support me through prayer.

The result of BMA was out on the 30, November 2005. The doctor told me that I had Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML), subtype M4. The French-American-British (FAB) classification divides AML into 8 subtypes, from M0 to M7. The doctor also said that my type of Leukaemia is easier to cure. She then explained to me how they were going to treat me and the risk involved in the treatment.

When I got my blood report on the 28 November, I know my family and I were going to face another crisis. I had been through many crises in life, mostly related to my family members, but this time it directly involved me and the BMA result again confirmed this.

The first reaction came to everyone mind was, “Why I get this disease?” The doctor said we know very little about the cause of Leukaemia apart from exposure to radioactive radiation and certain chemical such as benzene. No one was satisfied with this answer, so everyone started to speculate how this disease developed.

“It must be your diet…” to them all diseases are due to food.
“It must be the computer…” because I worked in front of computer 10 hours a day.
“It must be the handpone…” they suspected electromagnetic field is the culprit.
“It must be you work so hard…” because I worked harder than most of the staff.
“It must be a trial from God…” some Christian said.
“It must be you lack of exercise…” those who believed the body would secrete toxin through sweating.
“It must be due to accumulation of toxin in your body” those who believed some form of detoxification can prevent or cure all diseases.
“It must be due to too much stress…” someone said.
“It must be…”

Suddenly I was surrounded by a group of experts who knew the causes of the Leukaemia better than anyone else. I started to wonder how they could be more expert than the doctors and specialist. The first reason is the establishment of a lot of Multilevel Marketing (MLM) companies that sell “magic products” that claimed to kill all birds with one stone. The best strategy to sell the products is to tell you that you body accumulated too much toxins, it is too dangerous if you don't detoxify your body with their products. Driven by the dream of becoming financial independency within a short period of time and the promise of enjoying continuous effortless income for the generations to come, the MLM agents will penetrate every level of societies with the concept of body toxification and the necessity of detoxification. The 2nd reason is due to some very good public speakers who advocate natural therapy or alternative medicine, who always find their way into mass media to propagate their ideas. The public, including me when I first get exposed to this alternative medicine, would then take everything they speak as truth because they can speak very well and their points seem to be very reasonable.

Someone even advised me to abandon this conventional treatment and to go for alternative treatment because they heard someone get healed with this alternative treatment. I felt that it is too risky to go for alternative treatment just based on some isolated cases. So I asked for statistics such as percentage of a cure of AML with any form of alternative treatment, but no one could provide it to me. So I concluded it is more risky to go for alternative treatment than conventional treatment.

One thing I need to clarify is that I am not in anyway against the concept of natural therapy or alternative medicine, and also whatever products. I believe many of the concepts are very helpful to maintain a healthy living. But we also cannot take everything that they advocate as absolutely true as most of them claimed. If you start to read more and analyze carefully, your will soon find many contractions among them and many claims are based on very weak reasoning.

As a patient who is just diagnosed with cancer and struggling to accept the reality, expert ideas like these do not in any mean help him/her. It only brings more confusion to him/her. I believe I am not the only one who encountered this. Most of the patients should also experience this.

See you next post:-)