I've been thinking about cancer lately. Somebody close to me has it (or had it, depending on how well the surgery to excise it went) so it has been on my mind. In that time I've had a couple of thoughts.
Firstly I think it's entirely inaccurate to refer to the process of dealing with cancer as a fight or a battle. I don't know why but it seems to be the only disease we say that people actively struggle against. You don't see on headstones "here lies Arthur, 66, who died after a long fight with heart disease." Cancer seems to be the only one. I've seen it though. The secondary treatments radiotherapy and chemotherapy are the furthest thing from active battle you can imagine.
I've been told that the experience of sitting for hours as you watch poison drip in to your veins is close to Zen-like levels of boredom. You are drowning in passivity.
I get why people say it though. Who wouldn't want to feel as if they were actively fighting an illness. I'm just curious why this disease in particular is referred to in this way given, as I said, the stunning inactivity of the patient.
My second thought is that I feel sorrier for female sufferers than male ones. It's a horrific condition either way: it is the condition of having a living (sort of) entity inside you that grows and spreads and has the the solitary purpose of shortening your years. But for men it is this and nothing more. To be sure, this alone is bad enough but for women it has the added pang of seeming like a grotesque parody of childbirth.
Women have the ability to sustain a life within them which, over the course of months, grows and then, if they are lucky, they give life to it. Cancer, contrarily, is unwillingly being a host to an entity that grows and spreads and which, over the course of months if unlucky and years if luckier, takes life.
It's unfortunate for men and women who are afflicted but I think I feel additional sadness for women for this reason.
Anyway, that's all I was thinking. It's probably not of any interest to anybody except me but it was in my head so I thought I'd write it down.
