Offseason baseball Thread

How is girardi not a finalist? Good group of rookies.

 

Another RIP. But not sure if it totally adds up, unless it was a very aggressive form of cancer.

Red Sox Prospect Daniel Flores Passes Away Due To Cancer

 

What can "complications from cancer treatment" entail? Clean bill of health to dead in less than five months at age 17.

 

It can be a wide range of medical issues, depending on how his cancer was treated. Surgery creates one set of issues. Chemotherapy and radiation present different problems.

I've mentioned on another thread that my best friend just finished his third and final round of chemotherapy. He is battling cancer for the second time, the first being when he was a teenager. That time, the situation was much worse and he needed nine months of chemotherapy. Even though it was over 20 years ago, the doctors were wary of putting him through chemo again, so instead of doing it on an outpatient basis, they had him check into the hospital for each round. The concern was the strain on his heart.

When you think about how chemotherapy and radiation really work, there is a heck of a lot that can go wrong.

 

Roger Ebert nearly died because his chemo caused an artery to unexpectedly burst. Luckily he was just about to leave the hospital but hadn't. If he'd been on his way home, he would have died in his car. Chemo seems like a way of killing yourself just enough to live.

 

I've always thought of it as dumping poison into the body and hoping it kills the cancer before it kills the patient.

 

My mom passed away two weeks ago.

She had rectal cancer, which required an ostomy bag. The chemo went fine and all signs pointed to a fine recovery.

When they removed the bag, microscopic tears at the re-connection led to sepsis, and she passed away after a two-month battle. The whole trip - from diagnosis to death - was a little less than a year. She didn't die from the cancer, but she did die from complications from cancer treatment.

 

Sorry for the loss. That's awful.

 

Damn. That's awful. So sorry about your loss, Justin.

 

So sorry to hear, Justin.

My wife went from watching The Masters on Sunday to winding up on a ventilator in ICU 24 hours later when what we thought was just the flu turned out to be pneumonia with sepsis. Our primary care physician later told me the ER doctor in charge wrote in her chart "1 in 4 chance of survival." And all the time she was in ER that morning, we were joking around -- while her body was shutting down different vital organs in an effort to stay alive. Neither of us had any idea I came that close to planning her funeral instead of her birthday.

She spent 10 days in ICU and four more in recovery. But partly because of the illness and partly because of the mix of drugs needed to fight it, she's still struggling to get any kind of strength or endurance back. It just happened so fast to someone seemingly healthy. The allergist believes she was infected by something or someone that is harmless to the other 99 percent of the population.

The official report is strep, because that's what finally grew on the culture. But the ICU doctor said it could have been an atypical pneumonia like Legionaire's.

 

As I've learned in the last month or two - Sepsis is a coin flip for survival, at best. ....

And dang it: I told myself I wasn't going to come on here and make a, "My mom!" post. Funeral is this Saturday, followed by a Thanksgiving trip to Florida to scatter her ashes at her favorite beach. A bunch more difficult days to come.