Cancer is One Heck of a Whale

(whale sculpture by Preston Jackson, made out of recycled plastic bottles)

 Jessica McGhee, cancer artist

Having cancer is enormous. Like a whale. I picked up this image from Jessica McGhee when she spoke to my cancer support group. She began collecting the medical items from her cancer treatments — the bandages, elastic wraps, gauze, oncology name tags, and so on. The mound of this physical entity kept growing, and she started playing with it until it took on the form of a mishappened blue whale that is eerily beautiful and poignantly accurate. 

I should mention that she is a recycle artist who makes art and jewelry out of trash, using discarded objects like bottle caps, broken glass, and bits of plastic, so it was natural that she would wonder what she could make with all of her stuff, and gradually a whale took form. She’s also a home healthcare worker.

The whale is an intriguing image to use with cancer. A lot of physical material gets thrown out when you’re being treated because most of what the doctors and nurses use are one-use items to keep them sterile — needles, syringes, tubes, drug infusion containers, as well as the plastic wrappings that all of these items come packaged in. 

There’s also the endless amount of paper involved — the after-visit reports, bills, medication instructions with their do’s and don’ts, the folders and pamphlets saying what your cancer will do, what stage you are, how to handle the stress of losing the function of certain body parts, at least for a time, and what you can do about your fear of dying. As the physical items accumulate, you let your emotions guide them into a shape you can work with.

My own stack of cancer paperwork is two-feet tall. I could paper the inside of my house. It wears me out to remember how my stack accumulated page by page over four years as I went through each diagnostic test, treatment, blood draw, reports of weight and vitals, and the linear cascade of checkups.

But, are we the whale, or is cancer the whale, and we are learning to swim with it through the ocean of existence? Maybe the whale is the enormous amount of time we spend going to doctor appointments and therapies, week after week, month after month. There’s definitely a whale in here somewhere.

Having cancer is an emotional whale that begins with the Big Bang shock of being told you have something that will kill you if nothing is done. This explosion expands rapidly outward from there into every corner of your personal universe. Nothing in your life is ever the same again, and your emotions go on hyperdrive, or freefall (your choice). 

The emotional stress we endure during treatments builds up over the years as we keep wondering if we are going to survive, in what kind of shape, and how much physical damage we are going to have to live with. Frankly, it leaves me breathless to think about everything I’ve been through, and I marvel that I am somehow managing to survive. I’d like to stay it’s the luck of the Irish, but half of my ancestors came from Scotland who stayed in Ireland for a time after the Highland Clearances.

For most of my life, I’ve taken care of everything that needed to be done. Because I’m unable to get rid of cancer by myself, I’ve had to continually allow the doctors, nurses, and counselors to help me. When I was in the hospital, with IVs attached and catheters and probes inserted into intimate and sensitive areas, I had to set my pride and embarrassment aside and let nurses take care of my hygienic and bathroom needs, and I learned humility and felt gratitude for them.

I think cancer patients feel a rush of empathy for anyone who has cancer because we understand what they are going through, and many people do not. Sometimes it feels like our compassion for others has grown as large as a blue whale’s heart, the largest in the world — 5x4x5 feet in size.

I’ve met other people with cancer who are also dealing with their fear of dying, the aches and nausea of treatments, the pain, and the general discomfort and unease that they try to live with. Yet, as we share our cancer stories with each other, we feel the warmth of compassion and don’t feel so alone in what we are going through. It feels like each of us is a whale swimming in cancer’s immense ocean, and for a time we travel together in a pod for support and encouragement.

I wonder if Jessica will make blue whale pins, or start an Order of the Blue Whale for cancer survivors.

We are whales who sing our songs of life and hope, of trust and endurance. And our songs travel through the water and are heard by those who are desperate to hear.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow