What: An essay from Rachel Manteuffel on her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment that manages to be funny while also tackling the wrenching choice to have chemotherapy or not after a mastectomy, when it only presented her a 2% reduction in dying from cancer over the next 10 years. Somehow, she manages to artfully tie it to the election and the choice all Americans must make November 5.
Key line: “At that point, all the treatments we have for them wouldn’t work as well as they would right now. Cancer would — maybe! — be back, in more places, knowing more about how to beat our defensive mechanisms. Cancer, once defeated, is a bad actor who lurks and fumes and tends to return, say, four years later. Older. Angrier. More … malignant. … Another way to think about chemo is that if a hundred people like me choose it, two of us will be saved. There’s a big day in November, circled on my calendar, when the whole nightmare will finally be over, the whole threat gone. All the people who worked against this cancer will accomplish collectively with our votes more than any individual ever could. We will win. I hope. I hope.”
Source: Washington Post // https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/30/cancer-diagnosis-election-trump-harris-choice-undecided-voter/