But maybe, possibly, he wasn't dishonest about the prostate cancer. Maybe he didn't know.
There is a joke/cliche about men in their 70s and 80s. When they get together, before long they start talking about their prostates. Young people can think it's weird, but if they are lucky enough to get old someday, they will understand. Old people get around to talking about the aches, pains, and decrepitude of being old, with the prostate gland being among the most troublesome spot for men.
Maybe Joe Biden stopped getting his prostate checked. His doctor said he last got it checked in 2014, when he was about 72 years old.
My own gut instinct, if I learned I had cancer inside me, is to get the damned thing out, out out. That is why I insist on tests, I let a dermatologist burn off pre-cancers I got from my years in the sun, I get interventions like colonoscopies, and I get prostate tests.
That gut instinct is likely wrong as regards prostate cancer, even though it seems so obvious. In the last 48 hours two different physicians have taken me aside to tell me this. All those PSA and finger-probe tests I have done for decades made sense then, but no longer, now that I am 75. They have data. They have experience. Your common sense is failing you, Peter, they said.
I have a bit of analogous experience on this from my career as a financial advisor. Clients eager to make money by conscientious attention to their investments would tell me that we should "hold a stock while it was going up but then sell it when it starts to go down. Then buy it back when it starts to go up." What could be more obvious and reasonable?
The strategy embeds its own impossibility. "When it starts to go down" describes a stock that is still in an uptrend, which is why the going down is starting. "Go down" is only evident after something has in fact gone down, when the instruction is to buy the now-cheaper stock, not sell it. The obvious, common-sense strategy only works in hindsight if we ignore the tenses of the verbs.
We don't know what Joe Biden knew and when he knew it. What we do know is that he and the people around him were deep in a zone of denial about his physical and health. It was part of a pattern. It was a catastrophe for the country.
In matters of the prostate, willful blindness apparently makes sense. In matters of cognition and alertness, it doesn't.
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6 comments:
"We don't know what Joe Biden knew and when he knew it".
True enough. Nor can we trust anything that Biden or his team tell us on this and important related questions. "Let's move on", say many Democrats and their media allies. With a view to the ongoing downward trajectory of the Democratic Party's approval ratings, I'd say most Americans have already done so. This advanced cancer-news timing comes just after the Jake Tapper mea culpa and the release of the previously Merrick Garland-suppressed Robert Hur interview audio, wherein Biden sounded as bad in October 2023 as he did months later in the pivotal debate, and even that long before he left the most important office in the world. A scary Edith Wilson redux (apologies to Edith) a century or so later--except Woodrow wasn't being trotted out for an additional term?
Meanwhile, back to the "big, beautiful" pile of crapola, the shameless huckstering and capricious program cuts, the unresolved tariff wars, and the unresolved shooting wars in Ukraine and Gaza (let alone the Kashmir). Have the flaws of our current executive-heavy, two-party system ever been more apparent?
How does a Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis occur seemingly overnight? I asked my brother's doctor that question. Mike had diabetes, heart problems, and a degenerative hip, recovering from yet another heart surgery, when a consulting physician ordered an MRI test that revealed prostate cancer. At 71, he was being treated symptomatically by specialists. Mike's personal clinical physician (PCP) had limited contact with Mike after the cardiologists took over. No general tests were run for 2 years after his heart problems developed. Mike's PCP is a personal friend and a former student with impeccable medical school degrees and 20 years of experience in family practice. By the time we learned he had less than six months to live, it was too late to begin addressing and treating his prostate cancer that had already spread to his spine. He died in the rehabilitation care unit and was planned to be transferred to hospice the next day.
In the case of Joe Biden’s care team, I suggest that they were addressing other health issues and overlooked routine tests that would have been part of a general checkup.
It happened with my brother Mike, diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer at 71. Under the care of a team of cardiac specialists after multiple stents and a surgery, a consulting physician requested an MRI to assess his ongoing conditions. That led to the diagnosis of prostate cancer that had spread to his spine.
Mike’s preferred clinical physician (PCP) was out of the loop once under the care of the cardiac team. His complaints of back pain and trouble walking were attributed to a degenerative hip joint. He was also diabetic and obese.
Mike was in rehabilitation when the MRI was read, and his life expectancy was six months or less. His transfer to hospice care was scheduled for the next day, but he died that night.
He didn’t know: possible but unlikely. Treatment often consists of reducing testosterone levels, which can shrink tumors but often causes frailty and infirmity, including unsteady gait, loss of muscle mass, and loss of memory. Sound familiar? Cue the conspiracy canons.
As LD noted, there’s something seriously wrong with a system that made voters choose between Biden and Trump. On the other hand, Biden would be preferable to Trump even if he was comatose.
Mike
Is there something wrong with the “system” or has the secularization of our culture finally eroded our collective moral bearings to the point that a plurality of voters would choose such a leader? Including and especially by those voters who claim the kind of biblical truth that he not only violates, but openly despises?
It seems to me “the system” is only as strong as the moral character of the people who participate in it. Without a common definition of “virtue” then, there can never be agreement of best, right and just policies and it’s just one big food fight.
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