Like thousands of others in the Upper Valley and beyond, I’m getting ready for the Prouty, the spirited summer fundraiser for Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
My own contribution to the cause will be modest - probably a walk through the woods with the dog. I’m not about to scale Mt. Cube on a bike, at least not in July and probably not ever.
Even so, I may get some minor recognition for my effort - a thumb’s up or friendly fist-pumping wave. In years past, that bib tied to my waist has identified me as a cancer survivor, and survivors often get kindly attention and encouragement on a day dedicated to the promise of medical science and the possibility of a cure. I get that.
But I have to say I chafe at the word “survivor” - which is not to say I chafe at having survived. Maybe, like Groucho Marx, I don’t want lifelong membership in this club that would have me. It's a reminder of dues paid 16 years ago when I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.
There’s another reason, though, that I find the word problematic. “Survivor” is a signifier that not only sifts and separates former cancer patients from the general population; it also singles out cancer. Advocacy groups seeking resources for post-cancer care may find the label effective. But I’m not so sure it actually gives comfort to those recently diagnosed or to anyone else. Paradoxically, it may compound the fear surrounding what is, admittedly, a fearsome disease. I rarely hear anyone refer to heart attack survivors or stroke survivors. But cancer survivors are a category unto themselves, and by implication so is cancer. After all, people only survive what is thought to be deadly.
Yes, cancer almost always kills when it spreads. But the disease isn't always lethal, as some 14 million people in the United States can attest. The figure represents those who have a history of cancer, including those who live cancer-free for the balance of a long lifetime. According to the National Cancer Institute, rates of new cancer cases are decreasing while the number of survivors is growing.
There’s that word again. I’d prefer cancer “veteran” to “survivor.” But either way we succumb to the kind of thinking that Susan Sontag warned against in her exquisitely argued book Illness as Metaphor. It’s almost impossible to talk of cancer without drawing on the metaphors of conflict and war. Open the obituary pages and you'll read that so-and-so lost her "battle" with cancer. It isn’t a battle. If it were, survivors might be considered superior warriors, capable of resisting an invading enemy. That, of course, is magical thinking. Sontag was right. Illness, she wrote, is not a metaphor, and the most truthful way to regard diseases like cancer is to resist figurative language that distorts reality. On Saturday I plan to walk not as a “survivor,” but as a person hopeful that someday there won’t be any "cancer survivors" at all - just people who receive timely treatment and assuredly, unquestionably survive.
