As a cancer survivor who through many years of living and working in this country, I am fortunate enough to have excellent health care (VA, BCBS as a federal retiree and Medicare), I am immensely grateful for modern medicine and the doctors I have had these last few years. <br /><br />Contrary to what some may think, there really were no "good old days" in the realm of healthcare. Whether one approves of long life or not, the longevity for us in the first world these days is far longer than ever before unless you believe myths of hundreds of years of life in biblical days. That of course is your privilege.<br /><br />Personally I have a lot of question about there actually being any "good old days" but that is beside the point.<br /><br />My experience in this country of ours that is 35th in the world in healthcare on some lists, and is one of few countries where healthcare has become a for-profit industry instead of a basic right for everyone, is that when the doc does a biopsy and tells you, yep, sorry but this is malignant, all the bullshit goes out the window and if you are in the least bit like myself, you start dealing with that reality in as rapid and as well informed way you can.<br /><br />I found that I had to make some extremely hard decisions and do that pretty damn soon. I chose my course of action with the very best doctors available (using who my nurse friends recommended, believe me they know more than most about who is good and why) and it was partially successful. <br /><br />Due to a choice "I" made about what to leave and what to take, it came back, I chose to include a licensed naturopathic doctor that of course my for-profit insurance company would not recognize and not pay and treated my returned cancer with all natural treatments... to the tune of several thousand dollars from our pockets.<br /><br />After a year of this old Mr. Cancer merely sniffed and redoubled his size and I went to the very best radiation doctor in the city I lived in (Boise , Idaho has the absolute best, young and gifted docs I have ever known) and had a course of radiation to get Mr. Cancer to leave and go somewhere else....well he did, somewhere else in my body where the marker we have to go by, tells us he is hiding his little nasty self and waiting until I am not looking to say howdy again.<br /><br />I am 68 and have lived an incredible life and having faced death a number of times and found I was more ready for the passing than I had ever thought, I am not too worried....however I wasted zero time in making a bucket list and crossing them off as fast as I can.<br /><br />In March/April of 2013 we will make a foray deep into southern England where my roots run deep and is on the top of my list.<br /><br />We will spend some time feeling how that is. Visiting the town my family came from and we are named after, this being in the henge and stone circle country, I will commune with my ancestors.<br /><br />I am enormously grateful my wife is as young as she is and still in the workforce in the disaster business, one of the few growth industries I know of, so we will have the wherewithal to make these bucket list trips.<br /><br />My retired surgeon friend Jim B. tells me that the first time he practiced medicine they way he always wanted to was as a doc with Doctors without Borders in Liberia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan....they treated people for free and because it is the right thing to do, not to make money. He is now too old and not so well as to keep doing it (they require a doc be in the best health) but he still recruits for it.<br /><br />Good luck and I hope you never have to decide whether you have to eat bushes and weeds and hope for the best, or actually choose to attempt the best care available. In a country as rich as ours, we shouldn't have to decide on our healthcare by what is in our pockets but by the best options for cure or remission.<br />Bri