Tagged: Health
Cancer isn’t a battle, it’s cancer
A friend of mine drew my attention via Twitter this week to an article detailing Robert Peston’s thoughts on his late wife’s cancer. If you have not read it, it’s a compelling read, not least to rediscover the truth that cancer happens to the famous among us as readily as to ordinary mortals.
Full marks to Peston for ‘speaking out’, especially for remarking on the impact of the disease on his children. He is right; cancer does happen to a whole family, not just those receiving treatment. In this sense cancer is mundane, ordinary. Food still needs to be bought and prepared and eaten. The school run waits for no one.
Unfortunately this is the side of cancer still very much missing from everyday portrayals of the disease. We prefer to consume stories about the outward signifiers of cancer, for example articles about ‘brave’ actors being seen for the first time without any hair. Leaving aside the unpleasant vicariousness of sharing in the minutiae of celebrity suffering, the more insidious issue at stake here is the unquestioning acceptance of cancer as a battle.
To be precise, my issue is not with Robert Peston, but rather with unthinking copy editors who insist on inserting ‘battle with’ in front of the word cancer.
I have written here before about the deficiencies of the battle metaphor to describe cancer. Here is a summary:
1. From personal experience I can say after a day on a chemotherapy drip you feel the battle is being done to you, not that you are choosing to fight in one yourself.
2. The notion of a ‘battle’ places the responsibility of getting better upon the patient. This opens up the possibility that it is the ‘strong’ or ‘deserving’ patients who survive having cancer, and that those who die from it are somehow lacking in moral fibre. This is dangerous. (I sometimes wonder if it is not unlike a bizarre mutation of the Protestant work ethic, itself a mutation of the notion of the idea of ‘deserving’ to be ‘saved’.)
3. The idea of cancer as a battle unnecessarily romanticises cancer as a disease when there is nothing romantic about it. Consider the short sentence used at the head of the Peston article, used almost always in the past tense and when someone has just died. Even though the battle has been lost we persist in reassuring ourselves that the deceased has ‘given it everything’. Like so much that is said about cancer by people who have not had it, it is uttered more to reassure the speaker than those having treatment for the disease.
I have great admiration for those who fund research into cancer, the charities and charity runners ‘racing for life’ in the search for a so-called cure to the disease. Long may they all continue. But I do think the discourse around cancer reached a new low recently with the current Race for Life video, which contains the unintentionally hilarious line: ‘Cancer, you prat.’
Is this really the best we can do?
Far more tuthful is the view of those such as Ade Edmondson, who, in an article similar to Peston’s (but with a crucially different outcome) has said the following:
‘So, there is no battle. I hate the word battle. You just get battered with a load of drugs. People want the words “trauma”, “battle” and ” life-changing”, but it’s not a great three-part TV drama full of moments, it’s a long grind, like a slow car crash that will last five years and then, hopefully, we’ll get out.’
This pretty much nails it. But because the battle metaphor is so persuasive and sexy, voices like Edmondson’s are heard all too rarely.
Next time you are tempted to retweet stories such as Peston’s without a moment’s thought, please pause to question the efficacy of cancer as a battle, with its inevitable logic of valour, winners and losers. To misquote Orwell, in the battle against cancer as a war metaphor I do not need to ask myself which side I am on.
You can read my account of cancer in my memoir Love for Now and in my collection of poems Riddance.
When they told me I would live
Nine days after I was told that my chemotherapy treatment was not working in April 2006 the doctors discovered the mistake of the radiologist who originally reported on my scan.
The extract below is from Love for Now, my journal-memoir of treatment for lymphoma. It is now available as a Kindle edition on Amazon.
April 28, 2006
What is it like, being told you are going to live? You hug your mother, who cries. You phone your wife who goes ‘Yipee!’. You drink coffee and eat pastries to celebrate. You tell your cleaning ladies, who are so pleased (they thought you looked better than last week). You tell your daughter, who is off school with a sore throat. She says ‘Why are hospitals so stupid?’ You receive many phone calls. But what is it like?
It is like watching the light fade from a room, sunlight making patches on the house opposite, the pink tips of apple blossom daring to poke through into the same, as you have done a thousand times before. But this time you know you’ll be doing it again, next year, and probably, the year after that.
It is dreaming up something profound to say about Kylie Minogue’s post-treatment haircut, and about the newspaper coverage of it, but resisting the urge. Ditto the obituaries you read this week of the man who invented the CT scan and the man who discovered a cure for leukaemia in children. Life is too short, you tell yourself. From now on I will write what I want.
It is darting in and out of the office to check who has sent you the latest congratulatory email.
And remembering that Chelsea only need a point against United at the Bridge tomorrow to win the league.
It is feeling that you might start reading poetry again.
It is breathing in deeply on the doorstep in the sunshine, and, though it induces a coughing fit, being grateful for breath at all.
Relapsing from cancer…by mistake
Seven years ago this is what happened halfway through my treatment for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I went for a midway scan to report on the shrinkage of my tumour and was given the wrong results.
My tumour was in fact responding well to the chemotherapy treatment I was being given.
But the radiologist who analysed my scan pictures somehow looked at them the wrong way round, so mistakenly saw evidence of my tumour growing. I was told this meant it was not responding to treatment, and that a new, much harsher, course of chemotherapy would have to be put in place for me.
My family and I lived with the ‘truth’ of this misdiagnosis for nine days until the mistake was uncovered. In that time we did our best to commit to ordinary life as best we could, doing the school run, eating and watching crap telly together, as you do. I do know I began writing my funeral service. I even broke the habit of a lifetime and discussed money with my wife.
As my ward doctor told me: ‘If you’re given a shit pack of cards, those are the ones you play with.’
During this time I was glad to come across this poem by Patrick Kavanagh. It became a kind of touchstone, helping me to come to terms with my forthcoming oblivion in language that was even more direct than my doctors’.
Wet Evening in April
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.
Patrick Kavanagh
You can read the full account of my story in Love for Now and in Riddance
Lifesaving Poems: Jo Shapcott’s ‘Era’
As I say in my full length review of Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability, really good books about cancer are rare. Really great books about cancer, the ones that offer new perspectives and change the language with which we discuss the disease, are even rarer.
Of Mutability is one of these books.
I came across ‘Era’ in reviewing Of Mutability for The North magazine in 2010. I began reading the book as news about it was beginning to spread. By the time my review was published it had won the Costa Book of the year.
What struck me about the book, and why it will go on being so special, is the deliberate and cool detachment with which it is written. In one of the interviews she gave on winning the Costa, Shapcott was at pains to remind readers she was not an autobiographical writer ‘to a point’. I think this helps explain why the Costa judges prized Of Mutability as a ‘paean to creativity’, over and above its deft handling of the difficult subject matter of cancer, a word the book never uses.
Readers will be aware, therefore, that Shapcott has never been a poet who bursts into the waiting room shouting about her issues and drawing attention to herself. And yet it is impossible not to talk about Of Mutability in the context of cancer, even though the book, like all great books, finally outstrips its subject matter.
‘Era’ is the closest the book comes to putting on record what Thom Gunn called ‘the sniff of the real’ of what it is like to be treated for cancer. And yet the poem is not really ‘about’ that at all. The date in the first line and the ‘frontiers’ in the last refer to Iraq: 2003 may have been a monumental year in the life of the speaker, but we are not allowed to forget that those ‘jet trails’, like those ‘not far enough overhead’ in London, brought and continue to bring dire consequences.
The ‘squabbling’ magpies, chemical fountains and traffic ‘like crazy fish, with teeth’ all presage more intimate transformations in the body. The speaker is admirably clear-eyed about this: it is a poem of ‘goodbye’ to things as they are. The implication is there will be no return to normal.
This tender-yet-tough tone runs throughout the collection as a whole. If you do not own a copy, I urge you to get your hands on one now. It takes a special kind of sensibility to link unasked-for changes in the body to global issues of the kind we find here, not least that of climate change, with ‘red kites’ ‘spreading east’ and ‘February swallows’. The poem closes with a question but does not answer it. We leave the speaker poised on the edge of a new frontier, heading towards ‘those other places’, determined yet fragile, about to shed everything, ‘over there’.
Era
The twenty-second day of March two thousand and three
I left home shortly after eight thirty
on foot towards the City. I said goodbye
to the outside of my body: I was going in.
The magpies were squabbling in the park.
The little fountain splashed chemical bubbles
over its lip. Traffic swarmed and swam
round Vauxhall Cross, like crazy fish, with teeth.
And anything could be real in a country
where red kites were spreading east and now
we had February swallows. Planes for Heathrow
roared not far enough overhead, shedding
jet trails which pointed over there: those other
places where all the frontiers end with a question.
Jo Shapcott, from Of Mutability
