Good morning. There’s no easy way to approach a terminal illness. Today, we look at one family’s struggle to make the right decisions.
A good ending
It is really hard to know the best way to die. (Not speaking from experience.) Should our loved ones with terminal disease claw at every life-extending intervention, even if it makes living miserable? Should they seek the provider — and the treatment — that makes them feel most comfortable, even if it’s less effective? Are they in any position to judge what works and what doesn’t? Those questions bedevil this moving portrait of Rajeev Thadani’s final months. Faced with a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, he turned away from the chemotherapy regimen that frightened him and signed up for some new-agey healing at an Arizona clinic. For a princely sum, it offered “gentle” chemo, hydrogen peroxide infusions and testimonials from people who professed to be cured. Trisha Thadani, Rajeev’s daughter, wrote for The Times about what happened next. I asked her about it. Adam: Your dad’s death preceded Covid and MAHA, but he held views that were about to go very mainstream. Can you describe them? Trisha: His distrust of conventional medicine was a prominent feature of my childhood. He treated my brother and me with homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine, and got us exemptions for certain vaccines. He was incredibly sharp — and believed doctors would just overmedicate us and make us sicker. I was a healthy kid and never had a reason to question my dad’s beliefs. But I always thought of his views as on the fringe — so it was surprising to see them become so popular in America. Rajeev put off a visit to check out a nagging cough and shortness of breath. When he finally received a lung cancer diagnosis, how did he manage it? After my dad tried to self-treat his symptoms with natural remedies for months, his oncologist prescribed chemotherapy and immunotherapy. My family convinced him to give it a shot. He tried one round of treatment and felt so horrid that he vowed to never go back. He was at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the best cancer hospitals there is. But some staff members were pretty brusque with him. I texted a friend at the time: “The staff has been so rigid and unpleasant”; a doctor “made us feel like a burden”; “one nurse didn’t even look up from her computer!” Those moments really add up. But I have to give a disclaimer that my dad was a difficult patient. He went into his oncology appointments after spending hours researching alternatives. He did not want to be there and didn’t stay. He couldn’t get a clear prognosis from his oncologist because every patient is different. That propelled him on a search for alternatives. What did he find? My dad was inundated with ads for alternative cancer treatment clinics around the country and in Mexico. Clinics pay to target people who search for terms like “Stage 4 cancer survival rate” and “chemotherapy side effects.” He spoke to several other clinics — some of which I would later learn have troubled records — before picking one in Arizona.
You traveled with him to the clinic. What was your impression? I was very skeptical, but I felt reassured as soon as we got there. During our first visit, a naturopathic medical doctor sat with us for nearly four hours to explain their unique treatment regimen. It seemed so promising that I started to think my dad would actually beat his disease. I was thrilled at how much better my dad looked during his first weeks at the clinic. He finally had hope, and that was having a real effect on his mood and energy. But their treatments were pretty weird. My dad went to the clinic five days a week for treatment, which included a “proprietary” chemotherapy regimen and other supportive therapies. Little of it was backed by evidence for use against cancer — infusions of hydrogen peroxide, doses of ozone gas, coffee enemas. The clinic also sent him to Mexico for a cell therapy that it is not permitted to perform in the United States. His cancer still progressed. He declined so rapidly you couldn’t even get him home to New Jersey. I’m sorry to ask, but tell us about the end. About three months after joining the clinic, my dad went into respiratory failure and was admitted to a Scottsdale I.C.U. Even as he was clearly dying, he hung onto threads of hope. He’d recently read online that Fenbendazole, a dog dewormer, was a miracle cure for lung cancer. My dad spent some of his final conscious moments yelling at us to give him some. What do you regret about those last days? How much time he wasted chasing a miracle that never came.
How would you advise people now? Should he not have hoped? Hope is a delicate thing in the face of a fatal disease: It can give a patient like my dad the will to keep going, but it can also blur easily into false expectations and questionable decisions. It’s a tricky balance that looks different for every patient and family. Instead of chasing an elusive cure, I wish my dad had taken more time to say goodbye and celebrate a life well lived. Read about Rajeev’s journey into the wilds of new-age medicine here.
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