What is the worst disease one can get?

A diagnosis

Among the worst diseases are those that tell you, once diagnosed, that you only have so much time, whatever the doctors try. That even with a medical miracle, your days are counted.

Stage 4 cancers fall into this category.

You often don’t see or feel them coming. They could have been reaping inside you for five to ten years, before the first signs occur.

Innocent signs. Little lumps that could mean nothing. Little brown irregular dots on your skin. A cough that doesn’t go away. A sorrow throat. Tiredness.

Stage 4 — the pain

And then you are diagnosed in stage 4.

It means that the cancer has spread to other places in your body. It means that you are too late. In earlier stages, you still had a shot (if possibly a bad one), but now your possibilities are gone.

The doctors can only try to keep you alive for a while, in bearable pain. The word “trying” is very important here.

In the end, the pain will get so bad that you will beg for heavy sedation, even if that means that your eyes will never open again. Even if you are young, and even if you have very young children.

Even then.

The psychology of death

The burden of the message is as hard as the physical pain: from one day to another, you have become a dead woman walking. You are dying.

It could have been there for years, and you will go over it again and again, that if only it would have been diagnosed in an earlier stage — if only you would have done that early breast cancer check — if only you weren’t born with the faulted BRCA-genes — if only.

The truth is very hard, and unbearable: your future is gone.

Locked-in

Some years might pass in relatively comfortable circumstances (although that psychological torture is with you from the moment you wake up till the second you go asleep, and even in your dreams it goes on, and on, and on), but you do feel your body deteriorate.

The pain is definitely getting worse. And you are getting crazy.

(And so tired.)

But you can’t escape — not even in your head. Not even in the happiness of your kids, which is almost nonexistent now. You are totally locked in.

(And you know for sure that you won’t make your next birthday — which is soon.)

The electric mist

And then it gets misty.

People catch you staring into emptiness, and that is exactly what you are doing. Why look at your cell phone when the mist is everywhere ? Why spend your time at nonsense when you don’t have time ?

Why anything ?

The cancer has spread to your liver (it was already in the bones since the initial diagnosis), and now everybody can read it from your body — you are dying, dying, dying.

They all pity you — your family, your friends, even your former loving past — and you are standing in the middle of the bleakest storm, and all you can think about is that one single truth —

You were murdered from within.

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SOURCES: painting in the style of Zdzislaw Beksiński, called “Close-up portrait of a scary old man with a thousand eyes and mandibles” (painter unknown), at Open Art.