Battling cancer and more

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
May 4, 2016

LAST week was a traumatic one for my family. The youngest uncle in the family passed away after a long and agonising episode of lung cancer.

He had been in and out of hospital for "relief" or symptomatic treatment since he was too old and fragile for any form of aggressive therapy such as chemotherapy.

In other words, he just had to wait for his time – hastened by the lung cancer no doubt – as testified by the medical fraternity. It came on Friday last week, sadly.

Our last visit, a couple of days earlier, was heart-wrenching. The image of an aged and helpless person, who is practically skin and bones seated on a wheelchair with a tube supplying "pure" oxygen attached to him as a life-support system, remains a vivid one.

Even then he struggled to stay alive, the agony of which was obvious on his convoluted face as he tried hard to breathe.

We have taken breathing for granted as a God-given right throughout our lives, doing it with ease without even thinking, not until our lungs are crushed by fatal ailments to the point of no return as a result of inhaling carcinogenic substances.

This agonising image is not an isolated one, however. My association with Makna, the National Cancer Council, alerted us that cancer patients are left to suffer on their own away from public eyes.

They can be in the longhouses of Sarawak or the backwaters of the east coast in the peninsula, or in posh hospitals. Their misery does not touch us at all because as they say out of sight, out of mind.

Most of all we just don't care, although we know for a fact that millions are dying in this way due to a variety of cancers the cause of which is mostly avoidable as established by several world health authorities.

The Makna volunteers are acutely aware of this because they are constantly in touch with patients physically and virtually.

Many of the volunteers have had the rare experience of living with the patients and looking after them until the end.

They often realise that it does not have to be a tragic end if only we are more proactive, more morally conscious about how "sacred" life is and that it is not to be bought and sold for the material comfort of a few.

That aggression is not just limited to the war on terror in the battlefields as we see every day through the "idiot box", because "terror" can happen clandestinely in the most pretentious of places inhabited by hypocrites.

After all, they have no qualms in trading the life of another for their own material convenience and extravagance using whatever legal coverage that they can hide under.

Hence the fight for cancer has been a long-standing and precarious one. For each life saved, if at all, there are a million others in the pipeline waiting to be saved.

In other words, for a meagre ringgit that Makna raises for its noble life-saving activities in the fight against cancer, there is a far more unproportional amount spent to induce cancer almost ubiquitously.

What is more obscene is that in the latter case dividends are even declared for their "shareholders" and yet they still have enough to mount award-winning corporate responsibility projects, including providing scholarships, as a smoke-screen to camouflage their ruthless identities.

This of course is not new as much has been well-documented scientifically for those who are interested in seeking the "truth" and deriving honest policy decisions to protect and promote public health worldwide.

As such cancer is not just about a health issue but more so a moral one to safeguard the lives of millions from being wasted away.

This is imperative especially involving innocent children who unknowingly are being seduced to a lifestyle that will surely end in a premature and agonising death.

In other words, the commitment to ensure that all Malaysians are protected from all forms of cancer must also be the fight against corruption and collusion with those whose business is to spawn the deadly disease.

This can be an uphill call unless we are also prepared to fight the addiction to cigarettes.

With some four decades of experience in education locally and internationally, the writer believes that "another world is possible".