Terry, Actually, Interferon has not entirely gone away. I am not going to talk to much about what is going on here, suffice it to say, I am in touch with key researchers and patients and there are some exciting things happening. However, Iinterferon (IFN) does get lots of bad press, unfortunately not enough was known about it and in many cases it was not well used or tolerated. Many doctors and patients too (have I got tales to tell) thought that "more was better", that isn't really the case. That same mentality is creeping up again with the high doses of IM. Patients in the States have a choice now, and if it were me, I would just switch over, more is never better!
Don't you find something profoundly wrong with anyone who tells you at the start of your disease that you are going to be on this drug for the rest of your life? Do they know that a cure will never be found? If so, how do they know it? Just because "they" say that, why do you think you have to believe it and just be as happy as you can be about that? These drugs were only meant to be stop gaps - that means to keep us stable while work continues on for a cure. Money has to be made on diseases, otherwise why would anyone bother? If the salary for a specialist like a Hem/Onc or other type of doctor was only about 50K a year, how many little children do you think would be telling their parents "gee when I grow up I want to be a doctor". Would anyone study and work the amount of hours they do for a small salary? Then of course there is the ego factor and somewhere on the list, but never usually high up, is a small dose of altruism. To be fair, I am in the health care industry (have been for over 15 years - ironic I know) executives work as hard and study for as long. In short, these people as well as the researchers are all human beings like you and like me. What they do is their job, like you did your job, like I do mine. They get tired, burned out, and as fed up as all of us. All the more reason why we, the patients, need to stay on top of things. It isn't a perfect world. You do not have to "deal" with the side effects of Gleevec, you always have a choice. I know, I have made many choices. Interestingly enough, when you make the choice (whatever choice you want) then you usually do better with it. That is pretty amazing that your doctors will not even "think" of a BMT because Gleevec is so successful. In the end Terry, it isn't their choice - it is yours! I am not saying you should have a BMT. Far from it. You were saying that you wouldn't like to go through a BMT only to be told that it didn't work. But that is exactly what you are getting - what we are all getting with the drugs - it isn't a cure, it will never be a cure, and it doesn't even come close to a cure. At this point it is probably hard for you to beleive that I am not anti drugs - but believe it or not I am not anti anything. I do prefer to look at things realisticly. I admire the doctors, researchers and even some of the industry people. Specifically, I like to think that we can honor those doctors and researchers dedicated to this disease by not allowing ourselves to get used to this disease as a chronic disease. No - that just won't do. We all, each and everyone of us needs, to have hope and faith that work is progressing and that we can look forward to a cure sooner than later. Humankind has done a lot of wonderful things, and so many cancers have been "cured" we have every reason to expect that our form will be cured too! It is the responsibility of all of us to stay as healthy as we can and as active as we can in making sure that we support and honor the right causes and choices that will help us all reach a cure sooner than later. Sorry about your job, I do hope you get to go back to work and earn a decent wage. You seem to be much too young to be not out there. Cheers, Cheryl-Anne --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ [CMLHope] A support group of http://cmlhope.com ------------------------------------------------- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CMLHope" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CMLHope -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
