Health care: treatment vs. cure

If there’s one area my journalism career has led me to that I never thought I would be that interested in, it’s health care. I’ve always been so interested in politics, women’s issues, new media and youth culture that health care never crossed my mind.

Sort of. I did a few health care-related stories in second year, but until recently I considered them to be about women’s issues.

Redefining birth is about finding alternative ways to enjoy the natural birthing process rather than relying so heavily on medication and C-sections. No access to alternatives came out of research I did for the birthing story concerning the cost of all these alternatives, and how low-income women have no hope in hell of affording them. For the same class, I also wrote a technical piece on plan B, “the morning after pill.”

However, this year for my investigative reporting class I became really involved in an article about mental health treatment, in particular the treatment of people who are so ill they have to be held in hospital against their will to be treated. The story follows the attempts to treat a young woman’s mother, who is a paranoid schizophrenic, while explaining the ins-and-outs of the Ontario mental health care system, barriers to treatment and how some people are held in hospital without being treated for years or even decades.

Everyone who I spoke with had a really personal story about how they or their family has been affected by mental illness, and if they didn’t, then they were an expert or a doctor who was still fairly empathetic.

And while interviewing for all these articles, my sources said, “I’m so glad you’re writing about this. It doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in the media.”

I was reminded of this when I read an article about angry breast cancer survivors in a recent issue of Maclean’s. Okay, it’s not really about angry survivors, but it is about a book called After the Cure: The Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors, by Emily Abel and Saskia Subramanian.

After the Cure provides voice to breast cancer survivors thrust into a netherworld of chronic disability, afflicted with symptoms that include numbing fatigue, joint pain, mouth ulcers, mobility problems and severe cognitive impairment dubbed “chemobrain.” Their distress is compounded by doctors who dismiss their complaints as psychosomatic, and once-supportive family and friends who urge them to get on with their lives.

I had never heard the term “chemobrain” before, but I knew what it was. I saw it in my mom after she underwent chemotherapy treatment for her cancer in 2004.

Since then, I’ve resented chemotherapy for how it changed her in the last months of her life. I still wonder if we would have had more time with her had she just waited it out instead of pursuing aggressive, but ultimately unsuccessful, rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

It was her choice, of course. It was her way of fighting back against the cancer. But some days it made her physically and emotionally unrecognizable.

I hope that when I become a reporter I get the opportunity to cover health issues. I might have to stay a safe distance away from cancer for a while, but I want to come back to it one day because there are issues like “chemobrain” that just aren’t out there and you don’t know about it until someone you love has it.

It’s the same with the mental health system, or ways women can avoid a medicalized birth. It’s compelling and it teaches us so much more than we thought we knew.