Introspection, speculation, conjecture after the fact of immediate reality taking its course only leads to frustration with the realization that, in the words of my nephew, 'what will be, will be' (or did he say 'what is, is'?) and we as humans are vulnerable to situations we cannot control. But when new scientific medical advances look so promising in our struggle to advance beyond helplessness toward significant remediation, we muse over the losses we've had.

It's been a very long time since my father at age 54 died of cancer of the throat; his struggle, the agony and the pain, psychological and physical, marked me forever. And when my brother, the baby of the family, later, much later, died of an inoperative, metastasized stomach cancer for which he had no warning symptoms and was given the grim prognosis only months before he died, I could hardly believe it, and still don't.

At the time of my father's illness he willingly became involved in experimental chemotherapy. He did not want to, he did not intend to, he told me then, die. But of course, he did, after the disease wholly diminished him in its devastatingly totalitarian manner.

Fifty years later it was my brother's turn. And, as part of the palliative treatment offered to him, chemotherapy possibly prolonged his life by a month or so; it succeeded in shrinking the secondary tumours that had appeared, but had no effect whatever on the large and spreading original tumours. Through his ordeal he felt no pain, only remorse at the inability of his body to rally in its own defence. And he wept at all he was leaving behind, and his dashed plans for the future.

At the time, there was news of a new treatment called immunotherapy where the patient's own immune system is boosted for the purpose of doing what it is meant by natural endowment in nature's great biological blueprint to do, but in an accelerated, more robust manner; taking on the rogue cancer cells and destroying them. But immunotherapy, while being met with astounding success in early clinical trials, is still in its infancy, not close to yet being approved for routine use in cancer let alone in treating advanced, inoperative cancers.

Will it in the near future prove itself as the long-sought treatment against cancer that the world has been  hoping for? Time will tell. But time, the time it takes to give full confidence in its efficacy and outcome, is not in favour of those whose desperate cancer condition has left little time to. Like my brother.