I have read the phrase “courageous battle against cancer” far too many times lately.
As I have said before, there is nothing courageous about it. Cancer is a “fight or die” disease. From one friend’s recent experience, it sounds like it’s messy, brutish, sickening, and seemingly never-ending, with doctors who won’t tell you shit, and you simply have to endure it or face the alternative. It is not the fight you would choose, and you’re always on defense.
Courage? Shit. Confused? Uh-huh. Resentful? Yep. Scared of dying? Check. I watched my grandmother die of stomach cancer in the late 1970’s. Courage was the last thing on her mind. She did NOT want to die. And she did NOT want to suffer the terrible pain she was in. She had done nothing to deserve such a fate. And while there are certainly people I’d prefer to be six feet under, cancer is not what I’d wish on them to get them there. Give me a clean head shot or an overdose of sleeping pills, thanks. Or even a jump from a height. (It’s not the fall that kills you, just the sudden stop at the end.)
I saw a movie many years ago that was probably overly-maudlin about the whole Big C thing, but perhaps it might inform after all: The Doctor.
Anyway — can we stop already with the courage shit? Nobody fights cancer courageously. Fighting courageously suggests Marquis of Queensbury rules, or the Geneva Conventions. Nope. They fight it using every low, nasty, dirty trick the oncologists have in the book. And sometimes they lose, because the cancer is lower, nastier and dirtier.
The 300 who fought at Thermopylae were courageous. The Sacred Band of Thebes were courageous. The 600 of the Light Brigade were courageous.
Cancer is more like a bar fight with any weapon that comes to hand.
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Well said. Courage is what makes firefighters run into burning buildings. Self preservation is what makes the rest of us run out of them.
I absolutely agree with your assessment, although I would add that one can be courageous in how one faces that battle. Just fighting cancer (or any disease) doesn’t make you a hero; how you handle fighting that disease, however, can. (In other words, are you going to be a man/woman or a whiny bitch about it?)
(And yes, I am allowed by experience to say that.)
Indeed. While my father did not have cancer before his death, he lived with pain for a lot of years. You would not have known it had you met him. He was very nearly a Stoic about it.
My friend had surgery in July. He has been up and around for two months, even through the five weeks of chemo and radiation that just ended, and he’s looking forward to getting back on the road to promote his books in December. No whingers! 🙂
Oh, and when his hair grew back in, it came in curly. He looks like Mark Steyn. LOL