Which is probably totally fine - the statistics would speak the truth here. Funny how the airlines have this data but are not presenting it here, curious thing...
The German state is also helping public health insurers hide their dirty secret: in hundreds of thousands of cases, denials were legally flawed and the cases have to be reviewed. They refuse to do so on the behest of politics as a small number of cases will turn out to be intentionally negligent homicides caused by public officials.
A site properly presenting the facts is due for launch in the lead up to Germany's upcoming federal election. Until then, you can find a teaser here:
Any claim related to outpatient treatment which outside the ordinary requires prior approval there. You cannot opt to pay in advance and seek reimbursement later.
In the state of Bavaria the doctors at a government agency have been practicing without a medical license going back many years because their supervisor let this slide. I discovered her problem randomly in the course of litigation and it impacts probably a million case.
The person responsible for her staff of hundreds lacking a current medical license was later hired to lead the qualifications department at the medical board. That is, after I got her fired from her position and then from a job at a hospital (a felonious psychologist is unacceptable risk for patients). Politics would prefer to see her problem covered up.
AF also tried to pull the codeshare thing with me once. Didn't want to go around in circles with customer service and found it easier to initiate litigation. AF then hired a big law firm to defend the tiny case.
A week before a scheduled court hearing their lawyer calls me to negotiate. I tell her there is nothing to negotiate about, and she agrees. We chat for an hour anyway which was surely billed to her client AF. I receive full payment two days later.
One way to think about this: as a founder you charge your seed investors, whose capital you deploy, say 85% (preferences notwithstanding). Why wouldn't you do it all on your own and retain 100%? Capital inflow is a multiplier for your efforts, sometimes a gatekeeper too.
My rate for private health insurance in Germany is nearly 9.6k EUR/yr, not including family.
This is a contract so terms can vary. Here: zero deductible, vision and dental included, international coverage including US. Includes a savings-like provision required by law. It is designed to keep rates affordable over time.
This mirrors my personal experience. To make a treatment decision, against the advice of my local doctors, that was key to survival I relied on US research.
To compare costs: For an extremely rare cancer, total cost of treatment was 100k EUR in Germany, whereas US patients report case costs of >2m USD.
Part of these savings stem from the public healthcare system not providing adequate treatment, while strictly necessary for a reasonable chance of survival in this case. What happens in Germany then is the amazing doctors do stuff anyway (if you can convince them), bill whatever they can, and write off the remainder. Profits from privately insured patients make up for this shortfall here.
Public healthcare being adequate is somewhat of a myth, for Germany at least.
I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun.
A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case.
The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then caused the husband to panic with a morning fax sent to his law firm making fun of his felonious wife and mentioning the case. Without thinking, he used his close connections to the court, trying to save his wife I suppose. Apparently unaware I had caused this in a provable way, the top court decided the very same day to not take the case and gave no reason whatsoever. Such decisions are supposed to be scheduled ten days ahead by law, which did not occur here. The case was also objectively valid since one of the appeals court judges had refused to be on the panel, so the assignments were wrong, a severe procedural error. The judge assigned to fact-finding in the case was the President of this court, the number five in the diplomatic ranking of this nation.
My intent is to end his judicial career and thus alter the course of his nation a little bit.
I am only doing this for fun and don't care if this succeeds.
E-Mail in profile if you are a lawyer or journalist and want to see something interesting happen. There is already a public website with all case materials that caused further drama within the judiciary.
A tech connection: a false claim of immediate threat to the life of the felonious judge had been made to obtain an IP address from Cloudflare, bypassing due process.
Another tech connection: The legal entity operating the website is a DAO on Ethereum, the (minimal) costs are paid with funds originated from a tech billionaire...
I did consider this and protected myself by letting the judges know in a side letter about some background.
Obviously would not have pursued this matter if I wasn't a fairly well-connected person and Covid-19 restrictions made available the time to do so.
The veracity of the case can be trivially verified as I filed nearly everything electronically thus have receipts with digital signatures. A singular court decision was also served digitally because an enraged judge wanted it served instantly right after an ex-parte phone call didn't go the way he had thought.
Ahh, sorry. Hadn't had enough coffee to spot the sarcasm. Indeed, dangerous games to play against people without scruples.
I, too, have wanted to undertake projects that would fight against corruption, but I guess I shouldn't have any attachment to my family or friends if I were to go ahead.
There are many more fun details to the whole story. For example the judge had taken the case files to her house to keep them hidden there, in one panel decision a singular judge voted twice because he could only find one other judge willing to go along, the way I obtained certain info from court staffers was by showing up in person walking in crutches which I actually didn't need, some legal filings had appropriate chess endgame problems for a cover page, and so on.
Nobody expects you to handle your cases like a tech venture, where we only really care for high-variance outcomes and not the simple wins...
The court was unable to print pages due to a css media selector preventing this, so the - presumably bribed - judge had them printed at the nearby law offices of the influential husband. This showed up in log files with his IP address, and can likely be proven as the color printouts of screenshots have forensic features connecting them with his printer.
Since this leaves little doubt about an inappropriate connection to the case and possible bribery, which the prosecutor's office has a legal duty to investigate, this was considered the game over moment.
Somewhat bizarrely, the judge then claimed she felt threatened by this chess game. However, the queen actually remains standing at the end of the game.
It's in German language and legal stuff, although one may enjoy the renderings of numerous corruption-involved public officials. These were made using AnimeGANv2.
The felonious judge is named Wicke so this was thought to be the most hilarious domain name.
It has been kept low-profile on purpose because analytics enabled amazing observability about who talks to whom, and who is particularly nervous about the matter. The caching gets bypassed currently due to tracking cookies, which may explain slowness.
Also should point out the (excellent) criminal evidence has thus far not been made public. The state attorney has zero interest in touching a politically highly sensitive matter obviously, so his hand needs to be forced by means other than simply handing over the evidence....
> It has been kept low-profile on purpose because analytics enabled amazing observability about who talks to whom, and who is particularly nervous about the matter.
You are aware that this goes against the DSGVO? I think you are posting way too much information in this thread. I wish you the best of luck.
As a criminal defense strategy the judge made a claim she "felt threatened" for an extremely long duration including all of her decisions. I have thus filed for nullification, since her claim implies judicial bias.
This matter is currently pending.
I wanted to complete legal proceedings first. A late-night post in a half-day old thread on HN is getting orders of magnitudes more visits than I had thought.
Honestly not so sure. This appears to be a fairly corrupt nation as a baseline so many may find this matter not all that surprising. His appointment a few years ago was controversial within legal circles.
Unlike SCOTUS, Constitutional Court here is by law not entirely at liberty whether to take a case but who gets to interpret the statute. Of course it will be claimed this court can do however it wishes.
To fully convince the public the course of this case was far outside the norm certain data from this court will be helpful, which of course they refused to release voluntarily and the federal data protection authority, meant to enforce something similar to FOIA, claimed to have dropped a matter due to clerical error. This might suggest the matter is already a known political problem at the federal level, but one can only guess. Strangely enough, getting the info will ultimately involve suing the top court (administration) in a lower court.
One thing to keep in mind is that this nation is one without genuine separation of powers. Any matter ends up being citizen versus the state, not citizen invoking one part of the state to check on the power of another part.
This has realistically no more than a 10-15% chance of succeeding, not dissimilar to a startup. For either, it is perhaps better to not get attached too much to a specific outcome.
To quote one of the most formative phrases for me politically (and, come to think of it, in tech and in a bunch of other endeavors): “be realistic, demand the impossible”. Caring about the outcome isn’t the same as being attached to it.
I have nothing personally against the guy, responding to personal asks for a favor is inappropriate but simply how such things work.
This is simply a means to achieve the strictly necessary: to have two criminal offenders amongst judges removed from their appointments. Realistically this only happens if the prosecutors, which are directed by state politicians and are not independent, look bad to the public unless they handle the matter properly.
A lot of judges are somewhat corrupt, the difference is how much.
But make no mistake, the power/influence they yield is enormous and i would certainly restrain myself for ever doing this.
A judge ( in Belgium) stopped a documentary about his criminal doings, pledged psychological issues ( and his brother is a shrink) and is now happily drinking beers and enjoying ( forced) early retirement.
He accepted briberies from anyone to influence cases fyi. Some cases are pretty nuts too.
Oh yeah, "there was no proof of any briberies" was the result of many cases. But people who live nearby know a thing or two and there is exactly 0,0% chance that he was "clean".
Well aware of the politics. The play here was to predict the ways corruption works and use their own moves against the other side.
Obstruction of justice can already be shown to have occurred within the prosecutor's office, in a case against the judge related to her faking of a crime. Police had concluded there was no threat. That page went missing from her file but I have it from another source.
A number of my friends and acquaintances are, in fact, high-level judges. This court had no way of knowing this.
Her own staffer did ask me some time ago, unprompted, if she too must fear criminal charges. There exists proof of this.
I do feel bad for her and even the judge's superior, the court president, who I believe failed to take action not because she couldn't recognize the problem but because this judge wields more power than her boss.
Finally, some documents have been designated a state secret because public knowledge would be disadvantageous to the state, something I can agree with. These were circulated before I could interpret the acronyms thus outside my control now.
I'm not qualified to say this, so this isn't a diagnosis, but the post strikes me as similar in tone to the postings of a paranoid schizophrenic who regularly used to post on a forum I visited.
Completely convinced they're on the verge of uncovering something that will "change history" yet very difficult to follow the detail of what they're saying.
I don't believe or have claimed this will "change history".
Had in fact offered to let the whole matter slide if and only if two judges ruling on health insurance matters hand in their resignations, as I consider them a danger to the general public.
Is that really a decision for you to single handedly make? People make mistakes, but it doesn’t mean they are evil. Pushing them to admit their wrong doing, give up their livelihood/careers, etc. is just stupid. Especially if “doing it for fun”. That’s not admirable, it’s disturbing.
People have been using "the ends justify the means" to justify all sorts of unethical behavior, not the least of which includes torture, genocide, and wars. Let's not go down that ethical reasoning wormhole.
As for his story, my read on it must be much different from your own. Because from what I am seeing, this is far more about the judge's husband than anyone else, and it is to right a sense of personal injustice than a (still misguided) aim of doing what's best for everyone else. Oh, and he's doing it for fun (his words).
The judge felt safe to commit an overt serious crime due to her husband. He is the conditio sine qua non without which this the entire matter had not happened.
He could make a choice. Either talk to me or influence the court. The choice he ended up making is quite clear. Of course I could not point out his options, as that no doubt would have been misconstrued.
There is some evidence suggesting the cases at the court don't get assigned randomly, as per the rules, and she might ask for off-label use cases to get preferentially assigned to herself.
Upon an inquiry the court did not deny this is true. To find the truth one would have to verify the sequence of other case assignments, which should be possible from incoming filing times and such. Here a second case got assigned to her but with a sequence number oddly enough belonging to a different chamber. Per the law there was supposed to be a singular number, and for some reason she split the case without a required decision.
She is also the only judge at this court who ever wrote anything public on the topic.
Due to an adventurous recent personal medical history I became well-aware what problems unlawful denials do cause for patients.
Speaking of genocide, torture and war, since this topic is about german politics, it might be good to remember a certain time in that countries history, when the law was in support of all of these things. Breaking the law cannot be equated with ethical behavior. Social engineering is indeed a method, wether it is morally objectable needs to be argued and not assumed out of the gate.
I don’t think I made that argument, in fact, my comment was made specifically without the qualifier of it being legal vs. illegal. Manipulation (which let’s face it, social engineering is a fancy way of saying) is a pretty solid example of an unethical behavior depending on your ethical world view. Utilitarian? Great, you must also think torture is acceptable so long as it saves lives. Deontological ethical world views might have something different to say, speaking of Germans (e.g., Kant).
Regardless, I think contriving scenarios where you think someone may act corruptly just to catch them doing so is equally as unethical as a police officer encouraging someone to commit a terrorist act then arresting them once they do.
It is manipulative, may not have happened otherwise if not for the original actor, and is akin to saying “I hope you don’t behave like I’d expect a human to instinctually behave if put in a corner”.
Note I did nothing to manipulate the top court. The application was phrased politely and only hinted at a crime background.
Severe procedural errors including denial of access to court files alone justified a reversal, besides the blatant misinterpretation of the law. There was no need to argue beyond this point or label anyone an offender at the time.
(Ordinarily one would have filed to have the decision voided locally instead of applying to the top court, but that court had unlawfully denied access to the assignment rules and does to this day.)
Nice use of words specifying your actions regarding the high court instead of the judges in question, who were specifically being referred to.
You do realize that just because other people act like jerks, it does not give you license to do the same, right? I don’t know why you believe what you are doing is going to have a positive outcome for anyone, including yourself, but I think you have some serious growing up to do.
I’m sorry you had to go through what you did, I really am. It doesn’t sound like a positive experience and I have my own chronic health issues that have been a battle and I can understand being angry.
I just don’t believe it is yours or anyone’s place to take matters into their own hands, nor do I think their actions justify yours. In this situation, you all suck.
Consider I had just survived a rare cancer that kills nearly everyone who gets it quickly, then when addressing a serious side effect from treatment this happens.
Not claiming any moral high ground here. Many would descend into anger and despair or feelings of victimhood, I simply made a choice to play this like a game instead.
Hey, if nothing else, at least you’re owning it at this point in the conversation.
Separate: I sincerely hope you feel/get better my friend and are able to get the medical treatment you were seeking (if you haven’t already). Best wishes to you!
Thank you for your wishes. For future needs I was able to return to private health insurance which suffers from no such problem. However this cannot cover claims arisen prior to policy issue, so the subject matter remains open.
No judge ruling in this court actually has public health insurance.
I appreciate the offer. Otherwise I did have a superb experience with the medical system, that is real doctors not state workers with lapsed qualification.
Why do you believe it is your position to give any official ultimatums just to meet your own perceived sense of Justice? The way your are speaking about this is to right your own feelings of injustice, not anyone else’s, yet you do it under the auspices of doing what’s best for everyone else. Do they get a say in this as well?
You interpret this as an ultimatum, I see offering them a way out as being nice. At the same time one has to assert seeing through obvious b-s.
What is appropriate gets decided by lawmakers not judges.
Once judges willfully violate the code they have stepped outside their assigned role. This quickly became more of a political problem than a legal one, and what is right is ultimately for voters to decide.
Whether I am able to interpret the code and precedent correctly we will see. I did score close to the very top when taking the LSAT however.
To clarify, the "way out" was simply a new filing for an interim order based on the novel fact that a potentially lethal complication had just occurred in connection with the case. I substantiated this with medical and research evidence.
This was a very simple thing for her to grant, and in my view she was required to do so based on constitutional principles.
I would more likely than not have let the previous incident slide. Why she did not take this opportunity I have no idea.
You can try to wordsmith and twist the logic all you want. Telling someone “resign and do what I want, or else” is an ultimatum and bordering on blackmail. It is an ultimatum that is directly counter to your stated goal as well, which to “allow the voters to decide”. That’s you deciding for them.
Providing someone a nasty choice isnt neccesarily blackmail or wrong.
Imagine you work as a prosecutor. Someone submits fairly strong, and actionable evidence, that your wife has commited a crime your office is required to prosecute. You are legally compelled to excuse yourself, and let someone prosecute, preferably someone not independent of you. If you do, you know your wife will go to prison, and in the process of the procecution, your every dirty secret will be exposed, and even if you are entirely righteous, and was entierly unaware, and willing to believe the worst of your wife, your reputation will be in tatters. Its also possible that you know that the other prosecutor wont prosecute, but instead attempt to blackmail you, or your wife, using the evidence.
You now have a nasty choice.
Lets say you chose to hand the evidence over to a righteous collegue. Your reputation will be damaged regardless, but if you resign the damage will be light, and as you are no longer with the prosecutors office, you are not expected to approve requests for eg your personal banking information by default. Making it much easier to hide any missdeeds.
But if you keep working, everyone who wants your job will spread the information, and your opponents in court will bring it up repeatedly. Both with insentive to lie, or exaggerate. Further, prosecutors are often required, or at least expected, to cooperate with legal investigations in ways regular people are not.
Lets say you chose to hand the evidence to a non-righeous collegue. Your reputation is intact, but he will keep requesting favors, it looks better, but there are no guarantees it goes away.
You can also immideately resign, knowing that it will take a year or two for a replacement to get up to speed, and all you need to do is put the specific case on the bottom of the priority pile, pretend you never read it, and techically have commited no crime, while getting years to prepare, stuff to get lost, or just jump countries.
Or you can chose dismiss it for lack of evidence, toss the evidence in the bin, and pretend like it never happened. Its a boring procedural thing anyways, and odds are good it was just someone temporarily pissed off, who wont care. After all, they didnt even know they submitted it to your office, what idiot does that...
Its not blackmail. Its just that resigning is the better option for you.
I think the flaw in your logic is the assumption it was an either/or situation. There are a whole lot of options between “resign or face the consequences”, and let’s face it, is destroying someone’s career one way or the other (via by choice or otherwise) really a choice at all?
If you think it is, I’d be curious what your choice would be given the same scenario and whether you felt a bit coerced into your position.
Blackmail to me implies that the blackmailer requires something of the blackmailed, in exchange for the blackmailer to not take a specific action.
In my example, the sender has already taken their action and given no indication that they are willing to accept a bribe to retract it. If they had required payment to retract it, it would have been blackmail. Meaning no blackmail. The ops story is confusing, so I wont say anything about it. Not sure what you mean about choice there?
In my case? If I was roleplaying the example as the judge, probably call a press conference and loudly condemn my wife for her heinous actions, and promise to vindictively prosecute her to the full extent of the law. Then I would start doing that, knowing full well that her lawyer will argue I committed a procedural errors in managing the evidence(as people cannot prosecute their close relatives, or manage evidence thereof) which then precludes its use in court, letting her go free by technicality... While I win the next election for being the righteous crusader against corruption no matter how much it hurts... Well assuming I actually love her, if I didn't, or wanted to upgrade to a younger model, now is a perfect opportunity to get out of that pesky prenup...
I would not feel coerced, but I would feel threatened. I would like to think that I would chose my wife over my career any day, I hope I never need to find out.
Being forced to make a choice under threat is kind of the definition of coercion, but I think we are getting hung up on semantics (e.g., the word blackmail) and you certainly raise a mature perspective and valid points. I think your interpretation of blackmail is much more akin to extortion, but we can at least agree they felt threatened.
The choice I was referring to was one of resignation and giving into the threat, or fighting the base of OP’s claim(s). Both lead to the loss of their job, except with one option they at least have a chance of keeping their job (fighting it).
Just to clarify, I said it was bordering on blackmail, which I think we can probably agree with each other that this was skirting pretty close to that line.
However, my contention was that it was an ultimatum, while he stated it was not. You don’t seem to be arguing that it was not an ultimatum, just that it was not in your opinion blackmail, which is fair and I won’t beat a dead horse.
Thank you for also sharing your perspective on what you would do in the same situation. I wish I could so confidently say the same, especially when you involve kids, personal attachment, biased storytelling (e.g., him hearing a different story from her than what is/isn’t the truth, which no one knows here), among other factors.
It’s a complicated situation to say the least and based on what OP said, I think there were some serious mistakes made that had a negative impact on him. However, I still do not think his actions are justified, for much other purpose than to be vindictive/take out his anger, and is super risky for everyone involved.
We know nothing about these personalities and outside OP’s own experiences, neither does he. It’s also impossible to predict the future and whether his actions are going to somehow help society writ large, or do more damage than good.
That is my issue with the ultimatum, no matter what you want to call it.
I did not ask her or any judge to resign. This was a proposal to the prosecutor's office prior to filing any of the serious charges and triggering certain events then required from them by law.
Unlike public officials I was fully within my rights to first seek a more politically tenable solution.
There is no doubt everyone involved is fully aware of the situation, although people won't admit to it.
Ugh, your story literally changes and is moving the goal posts. So now it was the prosecutors who made the decision? Not that an indirect threat is any better, but here's your previous description: "I did offer each offender a second chance, as I thought they might have learned from this. They chose not to take it."
To each their own, do what you gotta do - but I stand by my original opinion on your actions.
It does sound insane, but sometimes these things are founded.
Just a few months ago, a local government body finally awards as millions to someone their formed chief executive had been persecuting for two decades. During that time, the random member of the public was imprisoned. This case involved multiple corrupt people.
If it wasn't for the happy conclusion, I'd have said this was the tale of a lunatic.
Who knows. They used to say people who think the government is saying on people are tin foil loonies, now everyone is worried about privacy. Don't see the reason to assume this most be crazy. Journalists as a whole have that "when I break this story everything is gonna change" mood regularly
For clarification, evidence for the bribery claim is only circumstantial at this point, which is also made clear in the record. The other claims however are substantiated with strong evidence encompassing intent.
It is sad that you would rather believe the parent has mental health issues, rather than entertain the possibility that yes, someone is actually doing something effective against powerful corrupt people, and that requires creative thinking.
To me, it echoes "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by La Boétie. Powerful people are just people. They are powerful because we are collectively granting them that power. This is not a case of delusion of grandeur, but a case of saying no to learned helplessness.
So thank you byecancer21 for what you're doing against corruption, from a stranger on the internet.
One of the documents shared on the page is a letter to the constitutional court of Germany where the plaintiff explains how not taking his case constitutes a mortal sin for which the president of the court will go to hell and lectures him that he cannot visit church services anymore.
It is very hard to take the rest seriously if the same person is claiming the corruption.
This was a fun thing sent three days before the election, which his party was expected to lose. The same judge was vice-leader of this party until his appointment and is known to be ultra-catholic.
Such writing is obviously not directed at him but rather at his staffers. At the lower courts the same tactic actually worked to change staff willingness to make themselves an accessory to crimes. An interesting consequence is later decision were not served correctly because no staffer wanted to put any identifying information on there anymore – this is however a legal requirement for certified copies.
Note I am not actually accusing the top judge of a crime but merely of inappropriate bias.
I am well aware it is important to convey the events in manner understandable to the general public. This has not occurred yet as I had no immediate plan to go public. Before HN the site was only known to a small circle of lawyers.
Well, adding "obviously" to an argument does not add anything to the argument.
I can see how you _might_ think this some type of mental health issue, but seeing a behavior that is weird from your point of view does not make it a medical behavior automatically. It might, it might not, and you can't tell for sure.
To push another armchair diagnosis with exactly the same value, I'd say it looks someone who plays the game of life at a high level, which can sometimes looks like lunacy from the outside. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
My inference is that you've never felt strongly about a topic like this, and live a fairly normal life. That's fine, but you shouldn't drag others down.
Not being able to tell if the facts are true I see why one might be inclined to think as much. I did discuss the matter with friends throughout the course of events to assure my own sanity however, also because certain aspects are in our view rather entertaining.
A future matter is the health data protection violation the judge's family committed by hiring problem solving consultants first and giving them my personal info, prior to escalating to a false threat claim.
Interestingly the law assigns such cases to her branch of the judiciary.
So this judge might soon become a witness or even defendant at her very own court, in a matter directed against her actions.
I will grant you this sounds crazy on the face of it. It is the law however (SGB X).
The medical reviewer, a public employee, had ruled on a matter she was not professionally qualified for.
The court asked the patient's doctor for facts as they routinely do, which left no room for denial. The judge dropped this document from one file, then in another file claimed the same matter had already been decided and passed over all evidence while at the same time knowingly making a false assertion of facts.
Access to these files was denied for months, beyond the constitutional court case even.
Without the ability review the files, had to guess what she had done and this did turn out to be factual later. From judicial instructions found on the back side of a page at the appeals level it is clear these judges had been aware. The judge assigned to fact-finding had refused to handle the matter, a procedural violation.
Had asked the medical board for proof as one way to have these decisions nullified. No response for months. In a hearing that was recorded I mentioned the medical board and, carelessly, two days later they sent a letter refusing me the information. It is clear a judge is behind this. This matter is now pending in administrative court.
My biggest immediate concern was the impact on family, and them viewing me differently and treating me as a sort of victim. Due to extreme rarity of my particular cancer the outcome was individually unpredictable. Overall the odds of survival are very low and death is often quick; a recent research paper uses the phrase "a grim affair" right in the title (some doctors get excited to see a singular case in their professional career and then publish a case report). It was simply unknowable at the time whether it was terminal or not.
What to do?
I expressly forbade my family to do any research and try to be medically helpful, including my wife who is a tenure-track science professor. Also I banned any form of pity.
I kept up social connections as well as I could, went on hiking trips in the mountains with insanely low PLT counts, attended big weddings in five different countries during chemo, and took other – in hindsight outrageous – risks just to keep living life. The pandemic has been much worse socially than very intense and prolonged chemo treatment.
I never asked about any kind of prognosis, although I had pulled the data from SEER as the most unbiased data source and assembled the L-shaped KM curves from that myself. Doctors only later admitted they thought things were "very bad".
A perhaps selfish thing I did was to avoid other patients during treatment (though my oncologist liked discussing other cases with me, as we never had to debate anything about my own case). The emotional burden would have been too large. I had observed in a FB group how entire families become obsessed with cancer and cannot pull themselves away from that many years after their loved one has passed away.
My family and friends mostly stuck with the rules and emotional damage was largely avoided.
The worst feeling for me as a patient was not impending doom but a loss of control. Certainly some will enjoy "being taken care of" and whatnot but that is not everyone's style. Let the patient decide which approach is right for them.
Every patient is different. Please respect their express wishes, even if that involves taking a step back from being overly helpful and involved.
Medically, I actually disagreed with some of the decisions from my – very competent and highly rated – doctors, and they were fine with that and followed the modified plan. Nobody can know whether this made a difference but things seem to have worked out surprisingly well for me.
