Among the fictions that newly-diagnosed patients encounter is the fantasy that cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them.
“If it weren’t for cancer, I would never have met all you fantastic women.”
Call me crazy, but I would have preferred to meet fantastic women while traveling in France. I’d trade in every one of my cancer friendships for the chance to eradicate this disease from my life and memory.
“I’ve never once been angry about having cancer.”
And if you’d gotten mad once or twice, would that have been so awful?
A case could be made that the onset of a serious illness is not a good time to alienate friends and family. On the other hand, there’s something liberating about admitting that cancer is the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Just don’t expect those around you to like it.
“If it weren’t for cancer, I would not have won the _______ [insert prize].”
And from the cemetery comes this chorus: “If it weren’t for cancer, I would not be dead.”
“Cancer has made me a better person.”
Tragedy can indeed inspire people to put aside petty concerns, but things don’t always go that way. The novelist Somerset Maugham worked as a doctor before he became a writer. What he experienced did not confirm the Victorian ideal of suffering leading to nobility and wisdom.
“I saw how men died,” he wrote. “I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief.” Far from uplifting patients, Maugham observed that sickness embittered them.
Ahem. Personally I found it helpful to set the bar low, as in: Today I will not snipe at anyone.
“I always look for the silver lining in everything, even cancer.”
That’s a good way to throw your back out.
The stereotype of the brave cancer patient who is happier and stronger than ever is touted everywhere we go. Think of the TV commercials of prospective patients frolicking in gardens and puttering around pottery barns in eager anticipation of starting chemotherapy. “I’m ready!” they say. If chemo were this much fun, addicts would be forging prescriptions for taxol, not painkillers.
And the granddaddy of them all: “Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
So what were you doing before cancer? Digging out septic tanks by hand?
I suggest a viewing of the great mock-documentary (perhaps the one that started the genre) This Is Spinal Tap, especially the scene when the new album arrives. The original album artwork has been censored, replaced by solid black.
Derek: You can see yourself in it…both sides…
Nigel: It’s like a black mirror. It’s so black. It’s like: How much more black could this be? And the answer is: None, none…more black.
David: I think you’re rationalizing this whole thing into something you did on purpose.
Some things in life just plain suck. Cancer is one of them.
