Rule #1: Never try to cheer up a cancer patient.
Rule #1000: Never try to cheer up a cancer patient.
I learned this early in life as a cancer patient at the age of 14 and implemented it as soon as I began to meet other cancer patients, either as a patient myself or as a volunteer for the American Cancer Society.
In between pasting ugly images of lifelong smokers on alley walls and community bulletin boards and handing out raffle prizes at charity golf tournaments, I also visited cancer patients of all ages in my small town, not so much doing, as being, being eyes and ears, seeing what could be done and hearing what no one else my age was hearing. This was an education, of sorts. An education that shaped me in different ways than characters in books.
So it came as an unwelcome surprise to me being treated for cancer again in my fifties to meet so many medical professionals who had never learned the lesson I learned 40 years ago.
There was the surgeon who kept putting a positive spin on breast cancer and bilateral mastectomy, as if toxic treatment and drastic surgery were marvelous opportunities for personal growth and development. As if instead of being a patient on an operating table, I was a roast pig at a sumptuous banquet that all the assistants and the nurses and the students were about to feast upon.
There was the nurse responsible for overseeing my extended chemo who left messages for me and who called me with medical updates while laughing with delight and exclaiming, Wonderful, wonderful! Everything’s wonderful!
While I know this kind of wishful thinking probably makes her job doable, I found it insulting and invalidating. As the side effects of chemo were intensified by my PTSD and I wept and raged and didn’t sleep, and relived every moment of my painful childhood cancer, this woman chortled and cooed, as if I were a new baby embracing the dawn. That I was not overwhelmed by joy seemed to puzzle her and then anger her.
Eventually she seemed disgusted that I wasn’t fulfilling her needs, that I didn’t want to be her buddy, I just wanted to get away from her.
After a year and a half, I emerge from a dark tunnel of suffering not just from cancer but from misunderstanding.
Nobody saw me for who I am, for what I have endured, for what is important to me.
Nobody recognized that the experiences that have formed me as a person have given me value, value in my capacity to be and to listen and to learn, by not putting my needs first, by not foisting my beliefs on others, by letting others be themselves while I observe and accept and acknowledge.
Is it really so hard? Letting others be themselves, even when it’s slightly inconvenient or somewhat challenging or even greatly upsetting?
I refuse to be the steam engine that runs over people on the tracks. I will help them up and support their escape. Or I will lie there with them, waiting for the signal to change.
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