Search Results: should i call treatment

Call me politically incorrect if you like but cancer is a disease and like any diesease, you don't "battle" or "fight" it and surviving any disease doesn't make you a fighter or warrior. Unlike losing battles people don't die from cancer or any other disease because they didn't fight hard enough they died because their treatment didn't work. This is just my theory: but the use of the war rhetoric when applied to cancer gives us some kind of comfort; i. e. it lets us believe that should something like that happen to us, by being strong and "fighting" it we can beat. However, in reality, what you do is get wherever the cancer was taken out, and blast the rest of your body with radiation and flood it with chemo and hope (or pray) that it does more harm to the cancer than you. I know that sounds cold but the reason that reality is so upsetting to us is that we like to think we have some kind of control over things that effect our lives in the biggest way yet cancer renders us so powerless. Like any disease: you get treated, endure the symptoms and hope for the best.


But if you must use the battle rhetoric, I've seen people get treated for cancer and it never seemed like they were actually fighting a battle, it seemed more like they were the battlefield ravaged by war (the fight between the medicine and the cells. The kind of rhetoric still used is still innapropriate because people speak of it like it's an enemy that you can visually see or observe, like it's something invading your body (i. e. conventional warfare). These would be more applicable to an infectious disease because for one your body is being invaded by something foriegn and with most (but not all) of those the duration is comparativley short and you either live or die. But cancer isn't an invasion of your body, it's one of your 60 trillion cells going rogue and unlike in conventional warfare, where the battle is over quickly and it's easy to tell friend from foe. As such you end up killing your own healthy cells getting treated for it. It all seems more like an insurgency or a guerilla warfare. Another similarity is this: every time the cancer cells began to form another tumor in your body, you kill it with radiation or chemo, but for every "battle" that you win you feel yourself getting weaker and weaker and this is very reminiscent of a rhyme about insurgencies: The point of guerilla war is not to suceed; it's alway been just to make the enemy bleed."