Cancer Is Not My Warp or Weft

Sarah, melanoma, also a mother, writer, actor, digital creator

Sarah is not her cancer. Cancer is not the warp and weft of her being. Cancer is woven into only part of her life. She wrote about this last week (9/8) in an insightful post on her Substack account Pause for Cancer.

Cancer is something that happens to you. It’s not something you are, and it’s not the work you choose to do to explore your passions in life, like being a writer, an engineer, a teacher, or a nurse. Her recent rumination started when she ran into a friend of a friend who said, “you’re the one with the cancer, right?” So her identity with this other person began with her being cancer. I imagine, and hope, that as they talked, probably about everything but cancer, that Sarah the Person replaced the initial label.

Cancer In the Air and Soil Around Us

 

Sandra Steingraber, environmental cancer

We know that some cancers are inherited. We know that if you use tobacco, you are likely to get lung cancer (John Updike). We know there are industrial carcinogens in the environment around us, although we may not be able to name one.

What Sandra Steingraber does in her 1997 book, Living Downstream, is document the cancer-causing chemicals in the air, water, and land. The World Health Organization estimates that 80-90% of cancers are instigated by environmental carcinogens, occupational risk factors, and lifestyle choices. In other words, these cancers are preventable. Only 5 to 10 % are hereditary. 

The Compassion of Caregivers

Empathy, presence, witness

Besides memoirs written by those who have cancer, there are books written by those who take care of those with cancer — the spouses, families, and friends. This is not surprising because cancer is hard on them, too. While caregivers may be more objective about the medical procedures, their accounts can also be heart-rending because they include the anguish of being unable to stop the pain their loved one is going through. Bearing witness to the suffering of others takes its own courage.

Gleason 6 Prostate Cancer

 Howard Wolinsky

It starts with the PSA blood test. If it rises above 4, you might have prostate cancer. The next diagnostic step is a digital rectal exam. Then you move on to an MRI and probably a biopsy, where they take a dozen samples from around the prostate. Pathology looks at the tissue samples and delivers a Gleason verdict.

The Strength of Cancer Women

 

Audre Lorde, breast and liver cancer

In her introduction to The Cancer Journals (1980), Audre Lorde, who had just gone through a mastectomy for breast cancer, sets out what she is going to talk about in her book: “the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.” 

Rabbit Gets Cancer

 

John Updike, lung cancer

First, a confession. Even though I was an English major years ago, I haven’t read much fiction after the shock of my first wife’s unexpected death in her forties twenty years ago, and this includes the works of John Updike. Only the directness of nonfiction and poetry have been able to penetrate the shell of reality.

I don’t know much about Updike’s cancer. Updike didn’t, either. He knew he had cancer for only one month before he died. I found half a dozen poems in his last poetry book, Endpoint and Other Poems (2009), published after his death. That’s a small amount of material to form any conclusions. The other poems in this collection were written over a number of years.

Am I My BMI?

 

The BMI gets under my skin.

I have a love/hate relationship with the BMI. Is “hate” too strong a word? There is no love. At every meeting with my oncologist, the notice flashes on the screen – “You’re still overweight, Bozo!” 

So I do seriously dislike the BMI because I’m never in the good zone. I diet, exercise, skimp, and have said “no” to dessert so often that I feel guilty whenever I actually eat one.

Has Cancer Made You Shallow?

 

Miriam Engelberg, breast cancer, graphic memoir

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics, 2006, by Miriam Engelberg.

Suzanne Shea cued me in to this gem of a cancer memoir. It recounts the cancer journey of Miriam from symptoms to diagnosis of breast cancer to chemo to metastatic recurrence. What makes this memoir different is that the journey is told in cartoons. It’s a graphic memoir that brings humor into the presentation, and humor with cancer helps us keep our emotions from hardening.

Be a Bird Feeder

Inspiration

Inspiration is a bird feeder. Every day we have to fill it up for it to be helpful.

Having cancer is a drag much of the time. We’re tired from the treatments, tired from trying to guess what is going to happen next, and we may not feel great, so we stay home in our sweltering, sweaty pot of woes so that we don’t bother anyone with our troubles.

We can all use a spark of something to liven up our day. It helps to get outside of the house for a time to remind us that the world still exists and to give us something to look forward to, even if we just walk around the block.

Healing Begins With Listening

 What can we learn from this book? If you’re seeing a primary doctor for the first time, and they don’t let you tell your story about what’s wrong, find a new doctor. The patient-doctor connection needs to be a relationship, not a transaction.

In her preface, Dr. Rita Charon lays out what her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006), is about: “narrative medicine [is] defined as medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” She goes on to say that it provides “health care professionals with practical wisdom in comprehending what patients endure in illness and what they themselves undergo in the care of the sick.”