Not battling cancer
In a restaurant review of all things, one of London’s most gifted newspaper columnists, A.A. Gill, recently revealed that he was riddled with cancer. To give you a taste of this man’s peerless prose: “There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy”. Three weeks later, on December 10th, he was dead. Cue immediately the inevitable cliché headlines, written by people with a lot less talent than Gill: “A.A. Gill loses brief battle with cancer.”
“Loses brief battle”? What the hell? The man discovered he had cancer all through his body. He died of this cancer very quickly. Why do we have do turn this into some sort of military engagement? There was no battle here, and he certainly wasn’t a loser. There was just an illness and a death - which, as we know, happens from time to time. In fact, as far as I know, most people who are born eventually end up dying. Do all of them “lose their battle with death”? What a load of rot! Death is simply a natural part of the life cycle, not an enemy to be demonised.
I’m not the only one to be irritated by this belligerent cancer vocabulary. Here, for example, is Christopher Hitchens, in his book Mortality:
People don’t have cancer; they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: “You can beat this”. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.
Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room… and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison, and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you.
Most cancer sufferers would agree with this: don't try and turn us into valiant heroes or battling warriors. We are just ordinary people getting mutilated, poisoned and incinerated by the best medical processes, and then hoping like mad to survive.
OK: I get it that cancers (and the word covers as much diversity of illness as does “virus”) are fearsome diseases, and that if you include all cancers together, they cause about 9,000 deaths per year in New Zealand, way ahead of heart disease, at 5,000. In a population of fewer than five million, that’s a lot of people to lose. In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “war on cancer”, and there are plenty of governments and private agencies pouring billions of dollars into cancer research. As a result, cancer death rates in developed countries are diminishing by about 2% per year. That’s great, and maybe it is legitimate to talk about “battling cancer” as a metaphor for all these collective efforts to reduce the suffering.
But do we have to make individual cancer sufferers feel that they somehow have an obligation to be “battlers” too (whatever that means)? They already have a grim disease; in addition to their physical discomfort, why do we then expect them to take on some sort of moral struggle? In his book C, because cowards get cancer too, John Diamond expresses his resentment over the question:
It’s the idea of taking spiritual responsibility for a disease once it’s been diagnosed which annoys me. For it leads to the idea of the survivor as personal hero - that only those who want to survive enough get through to the end, and the implied corollary that those who die are somehow lacking moral fibre and the will to live.
“Lacking moral fibre”; there’s the problem, and it makes me spit tacks. Trying to convince a cancer sufferer that their fate depends on their attitude is cruel, because if they end up dying, they then believe it’s somehow their fault. They “didn’t put up enough of a fight”; they weren’t strong enough; they "lost their battle".
But what’s even more galling is that the whole idea is totally false. Have a look at this discussion from the excellent American Cancer Society website :
Researchers looked at the emotional well-being of more than 1,000 patients with head and neck cancer to find out whether it affected survival. Over time, those who scored high on emotional well-being showed no differences in cancer growth or length of life when compared with those with low scores. Based on what we know now about how cancer starts and grows, there’s no reason to believe that emotions can cause cancer or help it grow.
(http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/attitudes-and-cancer)
Did you see that? Researchers found no evidence that emotional reactions have any effect on the genesis and growth of cancer; and a cancer sufferer’s attitude makes no difference to their length of life, i.e., their outcome. And the writers go on to warn:
Many people want to believe that the power of the mind can control serious diseases. This is a comforting belief that can make a person feel safer from the risk of serious illness. If it were true, you could use your mind to stop the cancer from growing. But the down side of such beliefs is that when people with cancer don’t do well, they may blame themselves.
That expression, blaming yourself, really does make me mad. Why should good people, struck down with cancer, also end up feeling guilty? It’s madness. You can’t “battle” cancer with your mind, any more than you can “battle” heart disease, tuberculosis or cholera. Or mortality, for that matter.
So I guess I am addressing both cancer sufferers and their friends and families. If you’re sick, don’t put guilt and pressure on yourself: just be yourself, and do what you need to. Be gentle with yourself.
And if you’re not sick, then don’t you dare lay the “tyranny of a guilt system” onto your cancer-stricken friend. Let them cope in the way they want to. I know you love them and want them to survive as long as possible. But if they curl into a ball and don’t want to talk to anyone, that’s their right. It won’t make them die any sooner. If they decide to adopt an attitude of heroism, support them. It won’t make them die any later, but they are choosing their own way of reacting, and you don’t have the right to impose your ideas onto them.
Dylan Thomas famously wrote a poem to his dying father, which began:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Someone said, and I agree, that this is great poetry - but very poor advice. And if I was Thomas Senior I think I would have responded to him with a stream of unprintable Welsh invective about where to put his “rage, rage”, which would translate into polite English as “Son, I’ll die the way I want to, thank you very much.”
Before we end this diatribe, what about other ways of “battling” cancer? Is there nothing physical we can do, no alternative product we can take, to fight back? Good news! I found a website full of excellent advice aimed specifically at sarcoma sufferers! Allow me to introduce you to the one and only CureZone.org. The kind folk here have given me tons of options to stock the arsenal before I set out armed for combat against my cancer. There is in fact so much I can do in this warfare.
Laughing
Start with the laughing cure! Laughing provides us with a natural inner massage, and through changes of mood it can account for up to 30% of your cure!
Body Cleansing
You must learn as much as possible about parasites. And don't forget also dental toxins.
1. Bowel cleanse and parasite cleanse
2. Dental cleanup - dental work may be one cofactor of your disease: amalgam, root canal, nickel crowns, cavitations (pocket inside jaw bone left after extraction of the wisdom and molar teeth )
3. Kidney cleanse
4. Liver cleanse and gall bladder cleanse - liver flush!
Sweating
Sweating is powerful way to cleanse your body from accumulated toxins.
Examples:
- exercise with a lot of clothes - sauna - drink warm tea in a hot room - eat CAYENNE pepper!
It is known that some modern industrial toxins and pesticides can leave your body only through sweat glands!
Fantastic. Let’s see - think I’ll start by eating cayenne pepper to get the sweat going; after that, I probably won’t need to do the bowel cleanse, so I’ll laugh myself to death. Now there’s a great way to beat cancer...
OK, tongue out of cheek: I do acknowledge that for at least some cancers, a sufferer can do stuff to improve their outcome - not by adopting a heroic attitude, but by changing diet and exercise habits. Here’s the American Cancer Society again:
Living a physically active lifestyle and eating a healthy diet should absolutely be top of mind for anyone who’s been diagnosed with cancer […]
Physical activity after diagnosis is linked to living longer and a reduced risk of the cancer returning among people living with cancer, including breast, colorectal, prostate, and ovarian cancer.
The most health benefits are associated with a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, poultry, and fish [...] Most of the studies about cancer and diet have focused on breast cancer.
This is good sensible advice; but you do need to notice that the research applies to certain forms of cancer, not all. Other cancers don’t seem to respond to any change of lifestyle. My surgeon is the leading sarcoma expert in New Zealand; his advice to me was that nothing I could do in terms of lifestyle would hinder the return of my liposarcoma. I made a few changes (including renting a Concept 2 rowing machine, and even using it occasionally), but decided to keep enjoying the lifestyle I wanted, eating plenty of food, some of it unhealthy, and drinking wine. I opted for a good enjoyable quality of life rather than depriving myself of pleasures when the expert told me it would do no good.
So I am not “battling cancer”. I am not going to "lose my battle against cancer". I am enjoying what remains of my life, filling it with the things I love, and rejecting alternative treatments or courses of action which will make me feel miserable. You might think I am foolish to trust the expert; but I think it’s perfectly reasonable, and I’m totally comfortable with what I’ve chosen. Anyone who tries to convince me otherwise can take their guilt trip and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Oh, and by the way:
Studies show that taking vitamins, herbs and other nutritional supplements often does not help cancer patients live longer, and may even shorten life. Before taking any supplement, discuss it with your health care provider. (American Cancer Soc.)
Just sayin' …
Happy Christmas everyone.
