JULY 1 — A Sabah man’s post about a long, uncomfortable wait in Queen Elizabeth Hospital was another reminder that the state’s health infrastructure is very much lacking.

I was born in that hospital.

Decades later, it shoulders too much of a burden, with Sabahans having to travel too far a distance to the state capital because of limited resources in their districts.

It wasn’t that long ago that cancer patients in Sabah had to fly to Kuala Lumpur for some treatments.

Now there are more cancer resources but they are just a fraction of what’s available in the Klang Valley.

My oncologist could point out the window across the road to where the pharmacy was, the one where I could place orders for my immunotherapy drugs.

While I had to crowdfund the five-figure sum for the drug Perjeta, I had the access and reach for my endeavours to be successful.

How would you explain to a middle-aged mother in a Sabah village two hours from town that she would need more money than she might have seen in a lifetime, to tip the odds in her favour?

She would likely be terrified; I knew I was.

I know another cancer patient who was also frightened by the cost, and her cancer is now at stage four with her biggest hope being a drug that will cost her RM60,000.

You can read about her and pass her funds if you’re able here.

In this age, it’s a blessing that there are so many more available treatments for what ails us.

Yet what use is that if people can’t afford them?

While some diseases you can perhaps reduce your chances of getting them with lifestyle tweaks, cancer doesn’t swerve from the virtuous.

They say that women who have had children, who breastfed, who do not take hormonal birth control are less likely to get breast cancer.

Yet all you need to do is visit the nearest chemotherapy daycare ward and so many of these women, on paper, should have lower risk and yet cancer found them still.

Cancer is just cells behaving like cells would, with random chance deciding who gets to stare death in the face, and who gets to have the Reaper reschedule his appointment for another time.

I will never be free of hospitals.

Like another survivor said, cancer patients iive scan-to-scan, with the looming spectre of recurrence always skulking, there being no magic incantation that will make it leave for good.

We need more doctors, more nurses, more hospitals, more income equality.

Instead we get more highways, more data centres, more announcements of budget cuts and more investors applauding retrenchment drives.

We have even turned the houses of healing into monuments to greed, with pretty fountains and banal elevator music.

The saying goes, “Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realise we cannot eat money.”

We used to consider locusts scourges; now we elect them to boards and make them trillionaires. 

Perhaps only when there are no more people left to slave and toil, with even the robot makers and tinkerers dead of sickness, starvation or from natural disasters, will the agents of capital understand that you cannot stripmine humanity in perpetuity.

As impossible as it might seem now, I still live in hope that I will see humanity win over the barons of greed before Death offers me a hand up the stairs, as we exist in this grand cinema we call life.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.