vincible

One of my friends, who is a sports writer for a Portland newspaper, recently told me he’d been assigned to profile a high school athlete who’d overcome leukemia in grade school to become his high school baseball team’s MVP.

When I heard his assignment, I issued him a challenge: write the entire article without using a single military analogy.

He didn’t understand, so I elaborated: It seems that everyone who talks about cancer, chemo, etc., feels obligated to compare cancer to combat. 

You receive the devastating diagnosis of cancer, the elusive, silent invader.  Then you “battle it.”  You “fight” for your life.  You “wage war” against the malignant cells.  You and your oncologist draw up a “strategy” to “beat” the disease.  And if you’re unlucky and you “lose the battle to cancer,” at least you will have “battled” cancer “bravely.” 

It is rumored that Spartan mothers used to tell their sons before a battle that they’d better, “Return with your shield or on it.”  (implying that they’d better return as heroes or fallen heroes.  if they returned as captives or without their shields, they’d be seen as cowards).

Back in modern America, only in the sarcastic pseudo-newspaper The Onion has anyone ever been described as “losing a cowardly battle to cancer.”  Cancer patients are always brave.  They always fight.  Having cancer is always a battle.

I don’t yet understand why cancer is the only disease that’s described in such militant terms.  But I’ve yet to read about someone who “fought” against COPD.  No one I know has “battled” diabetes.  I’ve never read an obituary in which the deceased “bravely” defied heart disease or “lost a five year battle with old age.” 

Recently, Tony Snow died of colon cancer. (Or, “lost a brave three year battle with colon cancer,” as the current vernacular would have it.)  When I heard the news, my heart sank.  I always felt somehow connected to him, because Mr. Snow was diagnosed with a recurrence of his colon cancer at the same time I was diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer, and we went through chemo simultaneously last summer. 

Call it survivor’s guilt or whatever you will, but when I heard that he died, and I still have a clean bill of health, I was deeply saddened.

I googled his name on the Internet, and came upon an interview done with David Gregory this spring.  Mr. Snow allowed Mr. Gregory to not only interview him, but also to follow him to a chemo session.  While he was sitting in a room getting ready to receive another chemo infusion, Mr. Snow told Mr. Gregory that he was going to beat this cancer.  He said that when you have cancer, if you buy yourself two or three years, you’ve bought yourself a decade because medicine is always making advances.  He said when he was diagnosed he told his children not to worry.  He promised them he’d be bouncing their children on his knee.

When he died, his three children were 10-15 years old.  They didn’t have their own children, and Mr. Snow did not bounce them on his knee.

And it made me wonder why he gave that quote to Mr. Gregory, after he already knew that his cancer had metastisized and that his chances of even surviving one year were slim to none.

It’s the same thought I have when I hear of cancer patients who undergo an experimental cancer treatment that may extend their life for 4-6 weeks, at best.  Do these patients really want to prolong their debilitating pain?  Are they so afraid of death they’d rather go through another month of hell than die sooner and put the agony behind them? 

I don’t know the answer, but my suspicion is that as a culture we’ve created a language and a mentality about cancer that propels cancer patients to keep up the apperance of “fighting” long after they’ve acknowledged the inevitable end of the disease.  Society tells cancer patients to return from their arduous journey “with your shield or on it.”  Either you beat the disease, or you lose a brave battle to it.  There is no white flag. There is no surrender.  There is no “making your peace” with cancer and submitting to it.  You either go down fighting, or, as in the celebrated case of Lance Armstrong, you don’t go down at all.

All of this explains why I didn’t even know that there was an antonym for the word “invincible” until I started writing this piece. 

As it turns out, “vincible,” the opposite of invincible, is actually a word.  This forbidden 8-letter word is in the dictionary. 

But terminal cancer patients will be forced to continue their “brave battles” until “vincible” enters our vocabularies.  And maybe, our consciences.

you can’t get cancer in your kneecap

When you are diagnosed with cancer, you have many hurdles to jump.  First the biopsies.  Then the surgery.  Then the chemo.  Then the baldness, the nausea, the joint pain, the muscle aches, the mouth sores and the fatigue.  Then comes radiation and more fatigue.  Then comes the moment when you’ve finished your last treatment, and you breathe a sigh of relief. 

And then comes the fear.

What if I’m never the same?  What if I can’t live with these scars?  What if they didn’t get it all?  What if it comes back?  What if it’s not so treatable next time?  What if I’m dying and I just don’t know it yet?

I imagine it’s similar to the way soldiers feel when they win a skirmish with the enemy they can see, but know they could still get taken out by the sniper they can’t see.  It’s a feeling of vulnerability.  Defenselessness.  And, if you think about it too long, debilitating fear.

For most cancer patients, this takes the form of a heightened awareness of every physical sensation.  I have a headache.  It must be a brain tumor.  My back hurts.  I must have spinal mets.  I forgot where I put my keys.  The brain tumor must be worse than I thought. 

The other day I was driving and I got a sudden twinge in my knee and I instinctively thought, I must have cancer in my knee.  And then I had to remind myself that you can’t get cancer in your kneecap.  

I started doing research on the Internet in an attempt to get a handle on this fear.  I wanted to find out how other cancer survivors have been able to move on with their lives, what has helped other women get over the fear of the unknown future.

On Breastcancer.org I found an article that listed ten steps you can take to minimize the fear of a recurrence.  It listed suggestions like, Be an active part of your treatment team.  Reach out to people around you for support and reassurance.  Ask  your oncologist for medicine to help you with your anxiety. And, Even women with very advanced cancer live longer than expected due to advances in cancer therapy.

Instead of assuaging my fear, the article greatly increased my apprehension.  Really?  Seriously?  That’s all you’ve got? I wondered. Am I really supposed to be less afraid because if I get metastatic cancer, a new chemo drug that might make me really sick could possibly add a few weeks or months to my tortured life?  That’s what’s supposed to make me feel better? 

If I wake up in the middle of the night with a panic attack, I’m really supposed to soothe myself with the thought,  Don’t worry, if you get metastatic cancer you won’t die in six months; you’ll die in nine, and then fall back into a blissful sleep. 

I don’t know who wrote that article, but if you’re reading this, THAT DOESN’T HELP AT ALL.

So what does help?  Not much, actually.  Unless your mind allows you to live in denial (mine, unfortunately, does not), the reality is that in some cases, cancer does come back and it’s not treatable, and in spite of the best treatment, people die.  So there you go.

 

The only reassurance I’ve been able to find in all of this is in Psalm 139 that says, “All of my days were written in Your book before one of them came to be…I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

The only meaningful answer I’ve been able to find for the lingering questions of an unknown future is that I have been made by a Creator who knows me and loves me and has carefully planned the day I was born and the day I will die. 

Any other hope seems at best trite, and at worst, a lie.

Anxiety medicines are temporary.  Even the best-intentioned family and friends are human and will let you down sometimes.  And while cancer advances are encouraging, and, let’s face it, the reason I’m alive to write this, they fail, too. 

But our Creator?  He never fails.  He is never late.  He is never wrong.  He knit my being together in infinitely careful detail, and He is the sovereign master of every part of me. 

I surrendered my life to Him long before this cancer came along.   And no matter what happens, He is, as He has always been, Lord of my life, my death, my career, my finances, my health – and yes, even my kneecaps.