Fighting words

Sitting in the chemotherapy day unit, cancer treatment looks fairly passive. There's the dread of anticipation beforehand, the pain of inserting the line, and the days of unpleasant side effects afterward, but most of the time people are sitting in a reclining chair with a drip in their arm.

So why do we constantly fall back on the cliche of "fighting cancer"? It's the staple of news reports of celebrities with cancer. Perhaps the metaphor of fighting injects some drama or even romance into an otherwise unpalatable process - it creates an illusion of action to oppose the fear of inexorable disease. Doesn't it seem more noble or heroic to picture the person engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the cancer, receiving terrible wounds but continuing on, taking great personal risks in the face of enemy fire, and with a hope of victory?

So what's the problem with the metaphor of "fighting cancer"? If by "fight" you mean "do something about it", then just about everyone fights. But then the metaphor seems empty - in journalistic language you "fight", say, a desalination plant, when in reality you just oppose it. For us "doing something about it" means getting rational treatment for which there's scientific evidence of possible benefits - so excluding juice diets etc. So far that's meant tests and scans, followed by chemotherapy, but there are possibilities ahead for surgery and radiotherapy.

If by "fight" you mean a denial of the obvious and a forced attitude of being "positive", that's not us either (I'll write a blog rant sometime about this). Perhaps that makes other people feel better, and keeps the unpleasant realities of metastatic cancer out of mind, but I don't think it affects the cancer itself not will it be personally helpful in the long run.

So should we use fighting words at all? I think there's a genuine struggle, but not as normally pictured. It's the struggle to live with a realistic assessment of what might happen, but not to be always overwhelmed by fear of loss. It's living with nasty side-effects, and the anticipation of further pain and discomfort, while still being a patient, gracious and caring person. It's the challenge to keep trusting God even as the end is approaching. Those are the struggles that occupy every day. In the end the fight is not with cancer itself, but with our own failings and weaknesses, brutally exposed by the cancer and its treatment. Our hope is to be able to say, at the end, "I have finished the race. I have kept the faith". That is victory, whereas if you see the fight as being against metastatic cancer itself, then defeat is nearly inevitable.

P.S. A friend, who has herself been treated for breast cancer, has written an eloquent thesis about the metaphors we use for cancer. It's available as an article