So much of the narrative around cancer is about the battle. We are encouraged to fight the cancer, starve the cancer, battle the disease. People generally refer to the cancer like some outside invader, an enemy to be thwarted and victory thereafter declared. But it is not some foreign invader, it arose out of my own body. I can not run from it or hide from it or trick it into going away. I cannot starve it without starving myself. It is a part of me, and though I do not like it I have to accept it.
I also dislike the battle metaphors because they position me against the cancer, where one of us wins and one of us loses, in a battle where you never come out alive anyhow. If I die of pancreatic cancer, will we say I beat lung and heart disease, kidney failure, car crashes, freak accidents and all the other things I didn’t succumb to? No, of course we don’t. We all know that life is always a losing battle, and I want to be defined by my life, not the end, whatever it is.
The battle is raging, to be sure. I can see it from the front lines, but it is not my battle to fight.
There is really very little that I can do to fight the cancer. I am not capable of making it go away on my own. I am not a strong warrior or a top-tier researcher who can vanquish the errant cells that decided to take over my body. I can endure the infusions, I can follow my doctor’s orders, but I cannot control whether the chemo works or not. I have to rely on my doctors, nurses and researchers coming up with new treatments to fight that battle for me. I am just a regular person and all I can do is show up.
The real battle, if we must use that metaphor, is happening in labs and research hospitals around the world. The people working every day to unlock new pathways to curing pancreatic cancer, testing hypotheses, and leveraging technology to accelerate trials are the ones fighting if anyone is. But again, if this disease is what kills me, that is not their failure. It is not a lost battle. It is simply that I didn’t get out of this alive, like every human before me. Let’s not chalk that up as a victory for cancer.
I was talking to my mom a few months back and she remarked that she admired my strength. I laughed, because I hate to hear it but dearly appreciated the sentiment.
I am not strong, after all. I am, in many ways, the opposite of strong. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always had a love for tools: they let me accomplish things without regard to physical strength.
I am not strong, but I am adaptable. I can endure harsh physical conditions, out in nature or in the chemo chair, but I do that through flexibility, and consistency, not some force of superhuman strength. Strong things break. Mighty trees crack in the wind, while supple saplings bend for a while and then continue growing.
I am not strong, but I am brave. I’ve cultivated bravery throughout my life, from not crying for shots as a child to swallowing my fear on solo adventures and travel in unstable regions as an adult. I like a bit of fear. Managing fear is familiar territory for me, but I do that through flexibility, not strength. If my chemo stops working, which is very common, then I will need to shift course.
I am not focused on an end goal where I win or lose. I am not fixated on a path of treatment or a golden bell that I will ring at the end. I choose to see every day of life as another victory, and to look for the opportunities in challenges. I am fine to endure this as long as I can, but I will need to be flexible enough to change when one treatment inevitably fails and I have to move on, like a silver fish swimming upstream, to the next.