Insipid Victory

I've been going back and forth about whether or not to comment on a story from the Atlantic from about a week ago, called "Lymphoma and the Insipid Victory." Someone sent me a link to it, and I read it, and it didn't hit me the way a When I Found Out I Had Cancer Story usually hits me. I blamed it on being kind of busy.

And then when some Lymphoma people starting discussing it on Facebook (I don't remember which group it was), I looked a little bit at their comments, which were negative, but it didn't really hit me what that had to do with my own reaction.

So I read it again. And I followed along OK -- Yes, the anger at being told, not directed at anyone, and then finally coming into focus when he saw his wife and baby. And then  he finds out a little bit more about his cancer. He goes to Google, and finds out that Hodgkin's "usually hits males between the ages of 15 and 35 and over the age of 55." And he finds out that "its cause is maddeningly unknown. Maybe it was all the diet soda I drank or the road trip I took that one time to Three Mile Island, or the fact that I have a black cat that always walks in front of me when I'm on the treadmill." Ha. Funny.

Also, "It's a rare cancer, representing only one percent of all cancers in the U.S."

And he gets some good news. "Best of all, we learned that treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma is pretty successful. According to American Cancer Institute statistics, the five-year survival rate is 85%, and ten-year is 81%. In researching, we also learned about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a related, but more serious and faster-acting cancer. I'd missed extremely bad news by three letters and a hyphen."

It was, upon re-reading, the NHL statement that bothered me. NHL is not "a" cancer, of course. And of its 30-60 different types (depending on who's doing the classifying),  a whole bunch of them are not "faster-acting." As we all know. As for "more serious"?  I don't know too many Hodgkin's patients who don't take their disease seriously.

And, in the end, that's what bothers me most. He really doesn't take this very seriously.

That's funny, maybe, coming from someone who spends a lot of time talking about how important it is for cancer patients to laugh at cancer. But that's not what I mean. He doesn't laugh at it, so much as kind of blow it off.

I get that a Google search isn't going to give you a whole lot of depth, especially about a disease that isn't your own. But the writer seems to be kind of willfully, maybe proudly, ignorant about his cancer. Which is fine when it's your own. I don't expect anyone to be as much of a Cancer Nerd as I am, and read the Journal of Clinical Oncology for fun. I know people, lots of people, who just don't want to know about their cancer, who want to put it in the hands of their doctor. (I have a friend with, ironically, Hodgkin's, who refused to even look at the bag of chemo when she was getting treatment.) And all that's fine. We deal with this thing whatever works for each of us.

But there's a difference between keeping it all to yourself and flaunting it in the Atlantic. "Flaunting" is probably a harsh word, but it bothers me when someone writing about cancer is uninformed. I don't think anyone would call Hodgkin's "rare." There are about 9000 new cases every year. Burkett's Lymphoma? That's rare. About 300 cases each year.

Is that being too picky? Maybe. But someone writing about cancer should have a better sense of what he's writing about, shouldn't he? Because when you're writing for the Atlantic, you're not just writing for yourself. You're writing for everyone who reads it, and you have a responsibility to get it right.

What upset people in the Facebook discussion most was this: "At no point, other than that one 45-minute car ride, was I looking death straight in its hollow eye sockets. My brush with it just wasn't bristly enough. Once it was discovered, cancer never really had a chance to kill me."

He means this to be praise for the current state of cancer treatment: science has come along enough, and his cancer was caught early enough, that even though the chemo made him feel "unrelievable agony. Nausea that wouldn't subside, aches that couldn't be soothed, weakness that wouldn't leave me."  It's just a little too dismissive, especially taken with the other statements he makes. Because some people with Hodgkin's aren't so lucky.

And this sounds funny, too, but it's a good article. I can see it's purpose: maybe someone reads it and thinks, "yeah, I'll be OK too." And there's certainly a purpose for articles like that. I just wish it was less about the writer's cancer, and more about cancer.

The comments at the end of the kind of share my ambivalence. Some people really liked it, some really didn't. Just as we all handle our cancer our own way, we all get what we want out of what we read.