CANCER ESSAY GIVES DIRECTIONS TO ‘CANCERLAND’ AND BACK

 

 

The ties that bind us are few and far between. Instead of vines like Tarzan’s jungle swing time, they’re more like rope climb in junior high gym class.

 

You get to the top and back down and collect your honor: another chance to climb to the rope top and touch the roof beam. The next rope climb is in another school district. Participation is it’s own reward.

 

The same rule doesn’t apply in cancer.

With a shadow so huge, any cancer evidence darkens the day, the week, and longer. It’s the stab in the neck phone call that starts dimming the lights, captured so well by Jennifer Weiner in the New York Times’ Sunday Review.

 

She opens with,

 

“I knew, as soon as I heard the radiologist’s voice on the phone, that the news wasn’t good. “Is this an O.K. time to talk?” she asked. If everything was fine, she would have said that. Instead, she was saying, “I’m so sorry, but your biopsy came back positive for cancer.”

Still in my pajamas, I scribbled down notes. “Will probably need lumpectomy and radiology. Find surgeon. Call this number.” Of course, through the 10-minute conversation, the only word that really registered was “cancer.”

 

The Edward Hopper-looking media sets the mood for her cancer journey.

 

The key word is cancer, not what and where it is in my cancer essay reviewing cancer essay. I’ve come to the realization the hard way. There’s no such thing as a ‘good’ cancer.

 

Ms Weiner turned over lots of rocks in her research.

 

Dr. Steven Katz, a professor of medicine and health management and policy at the University of Michigan, studies cancer treatment communication and decision-making. He understands that people who hear the C-word want to take immediate action. “Our intuitive and emotional reactions are wired for millennia and millennia,” he said. “When there’s a fire in the cave, you run.”

With cancer we run as fast as we can to the nearest ‘Everything will be okay’ station. It turns out we’ve all got our bags packed for Cancerland and just don’t know it.

 

Making good decisions begin with what you hear from your doctor in the first place.

“The way we frame illness and the treatment options is the most important factor driving what happens next,” he said. “And the cancer label is particularly profound.”

“Did you get a second opinion?” he asked me.

 

Listen very carefully here when I say, “Get a second opinion.”

 

The doctors call it a philosophy, a different philosophy. Each doctor has a philosophy? What else can you call it when one says you need three different types of chemo therapy and a chemo pump, and another says one chemo is all your particular cancer requires.

 

When I said that I hadn’t, he wasn’t surprised. According to a study by Dr. Katz and other researchers, more than 90 percent of patients newly diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer do not seek a second opinion. Like me, they’re operating on a toxic cocktail of panic and what Dr. Katz calls “anticipated regret” — the idea that you want to throw every possible solution at a problem so that, at the end of the day, you can think, “I tried everything.” Doctors, he said, need more training in addressing patients’ intuitions. Patients need to slow down and try to keep their emotions in check.

 

Some emotions might say, “I’ve got a fire burning inside my body, Plato. I don’t need some damn philosophy, I need a fireman to hose this sh!t down. Give it to me, all of it. I want every chemo, every trial drug, every voodoo shaman powder. I want it all, and I want it now.” This isn’t that sort of cancer essay.

 

Instead, take the process route. Cancer doctors and researchers and techs do a job. Let them do their job when their job is you. If you feel like a number in the process, try and relax. You’ll get your turn in the barrel.

 

Cancerland is full of barrels waiting and ropes to climb.