Life is cruel sometimes. Damn cruel. People are sick and dying. Good things are happening to bad people, my family has a beloved cat of 15 – longer than my children have been alive and my wife and I have been married (a birthday present for her in 2010 while we were dating) – in the last stages of life due to the evils of cancer.

Life is also beautiful – we are thankful for those 15 years, every moment of them, as we are all thankful for the time we’ve had with loved ones no longer with us. The knowledge that it ends brings about an appreciation of the moment we likely would not otherwise have.

That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t do anything, any of us, to buy one more day for whatever living creature we loved and have lost. When they are our fellow human beings, the fight for life takes on a special urgency, as we are the only creatures acutely aware of our own mortality.

To fight against that mortality, we have developed treatments, surgeries and prescription drugs to aid us in that ultimately futile endeavor. As evidenced by the horrible case of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams and his fight for treatment of his cancer, who needed to publicly ask the President of the United States for help in getting a drug treatment to prolong his life.

The President helped, which is excellent, but not everyone can avail themselves of a relationship with the President of the United States. The rest of us have to rely on a mix of health insurance and health care professionals,........

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