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jseliger's avatar

"After uttering something unprintable, he said: 'I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.'"

I'm dying of squamous cell carcinoma, although that dying has been arrested slightly and temporarily by a clinical trial drug: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/20/finally-some-good-tumor-news-but-also-is-that-blood-i-just-spit-up/, and a lot of well-meaning people have said or implied that medical suffering builds character or makes me stronger or grants me wisdom or something. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it, and the word "cope" comes to mind.

I'd have preferred to have had effective drugs that prevented the recurrence and metastases to this kind of adversity. It's made me weaker, not stronger.

And although I'm doing the clinical trial primarily because I don't want my wife to be lonely after I'm gone, I'm also doing it in the hopes that the data I help generate will mean that fewer people have to go through hell I've been through. In other words, I'm doing some of it so others won't have to.

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Ibrahim SowunmI's avatar

This reminds me of conversations friends would have around bullying. They would typically say that bullying is good as it builds character. I don’t have any stats on this whatever but I would bargain that the overwhelming majority of bullying is developmentally detrimental. It doesn’t allow mean people to soften their guilt and doesn’t fit in with the “hard times, hard men” paradigm.

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