I Lost My Father To A Miracle Cure
I haven't always been a doctor. Another lifetime ago, I was an angry and disinterested teenager, with parents who had split up when I was four. My dad moved overseas when I was 12, and then returned when I was 17 because he had metastatic melanoma and he’d used up all his money on American clinical trials.
I saw him on and off over the next year, at varying points of his treatment. Well and playing the piano one time; pale and crying in a bed in Box Hill Hospital another. Well and playing the piano again (he was a musical genius).
And then one day at the age of 18, I went to see him in Tasmania where he was staying. He told me that he'd decided to stop chemotherapy, and that he'd been given a 10 per cent chance of survival. Neither of these meant anything at all to me. I did not know what he was talking about.
In the same breath, he told me that he firmly believed in mind over matter, and that he was putting himself in that 10 per cent of people who survived. And then he handed me a book about this magical cure for cancer, Essiac tea.
The book had it all. It had the fact that it was invented by a nurse in the 1920s. It had the multitudes of anecdotal reports of cancers falling away like “cottage cheese”. It had the suggestion that it was being covered up by pharmaceutical companies and that this was it, THE cure for cancer.
That night, teenage me went to bed with a torch, and stayed up reading all about this marvellous secret being kept from the world. This tea that was going to help save my dad. I had spent my whole life waiting for him to return, waiting to see him, waiting for him to call.
The next morning, I woke up and told him he was going to beat it. We went to a mountain and collected rainwater and made the tea. We were together again. I had absolute trust. Partly because he was my dad, and partly, because he was a doctor.
Never mind that he was cachectic (severely underweight). Never mind that walking was getting more painful from the cancer that had invaded his bones. Never mind that six months later he had a seizure. He kept drinking that tea and telling me he wasn’t going to die.
““He told me that he firmly believed in mind over matter … then he handed me a book about this magical cure for cancer, Essiac tea.””
People tried to tell me, of course. Gently and not so gently. I got so angry at them. The more they tried to tell me, the angrier I became. It was my dad and I against the world. The word “denial” was used a lot in my presence.
And then, the final time I went to see him, I was told in a corridor by his oncologist that he had 48 hours left to live. My dad was in Brisbane this time, on a syringe driver (palliated, in a palliative hospital), trying to hide he was dying.
I don’t think he knew we were coming. I just don’t think he could face the person he’d convinced perhaps a little too well that he wasn’t going to die. I don’t think he could face of any us for that reason. He’d been in and out of our lives, and now he was really, really going.
That whole year, I spent hours on the internet, reading reams of information about Essiac tea, about the big pharma conspiracies, feeding myself everything I needed to hear to construct a world in which my dad, who I adored, didn't die of cancer.
But he did. Four days after being told in that corridor, he died. I was 19. While he was dying, he told me not to waste my life. That was regret talking. But what about my beliefs about the tea, big pharma? They shattered – that mirage brutally shattered into pieces.
I truly believe that those deep in the grip of these stories, who give them a reality they so deeply need, will not come out of it through shaming or attempts to reorient their reality. Only direct experience will. I finally realised the false hope and scam that it was.
Since then, I have lost more family members to cancer. Since then, I have learnt of so many miracle cures. None of them have cured a thing. I have worked in palliative care and looked after patients with terminal cancers that might have been cured, who were up to their eyeballs in debt from paying for miracle cures. Because between my dad dying and now, the miracle cure industry has become big business – $50,000 for IV ozone therapy plus the cost of flights; IV vitamins; coffee enemas. Essiac tea is still being sold to cure cancer. Loved ones still die, believers are still shattered.
If you’re on the fence, believe the person who must be held accountable. Believe the person who says, “I don't have all the answers, but this is the best we’ve got”. No-one goes into healthcare to hold back treatments from anyone. We’re all here for good reasons.
Sometimes I try, gently, to reorient people away from whatever flavour of the month miracle cure is going around (FYI, ivermectin was doing the rounds long before COVID). Talking about the reality of what we see at the frontline is our greatest power.
I went into medicine later than most and I lived a life as someone else. That someone else can’t make head nor tail of a journal article. They can make sense of emotional claims and magical tales of cures. So, I tell them my stories. Of pandemics and polio and vaccinations. Of how to die comfortably, instead of in tears from these sad choices.