"I HATE, I HATE, I HATE Cancer!"

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…


Watch this video clip and replace the words “peter pan” with “CANCER”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHulYXfgG0

While I especially loathe breast cancer, I have come to hate ALL cancers equally in my relatively young life (as compared to the Empire State Building or the Pyramids at Giza).

My wife, of course is a one-and-a-half-year breast cancer survivor. My friend is a one year testicular cancer survivor. The only thing on this Earth that could defeat my brother-in-law’s indomitable spirit was NOT hemophilia, NOT arthritis, NOT AIDS…but liver cancer. My wife's mother died of lung cancer. Now the newest loathsomeness is my life is to discover that a young person for whom I am nominally responsible is living temporarily with a seventeen-year-young woman who discovered in January that she had ovarian cancer and who started chemotherapy last week.

The young person for whom I am nominally responsible, has a relative in Scandinavia who had to explain what the American English word “chemotherapy” meant. Enlightened, she eventually ended up in my office sharing her sadness, confusion and story. When she reached the page where she had the relative explain what our word meant, it didn’t exactly translate well. In essence, I found out that one word in Scandanavia for “chemotherapy” is förgiftningceller (at least, that's how I heard it) which means, significantly, “poisoning the cells”. I plan to take that up in another post.

OK – it’s a day later. I needed to take a deep breath, that’s for sure. My sentences were twisty and long.

It’s because cancer makes me hyperactive. I also realize that I FORGOT several other cancers: my dad had prostate cancer that was treated and also caused a family split; my brother, sister and sister-in-law had skin cancers in various places that were all painfully treated.

What is it with cancer?

It strikes young and old alike. Male and female. Knows nothing about race or nationality or ethnic group. There are ribbons of “26 acknowledged cancer awareness colors” (http://www.choosehope.com/category/by-cancer-color-cancer-type). It seems that everyone knows someone who has had, will have or has died of cancer.

So why hasn’t this banner of 26 colors united the Human race? Certainly nothing is more personal and nothing else is so suitably HATEABLE. If I were to say, “I hate, I hate, I hate CANCER!” Few people would quip, “Oh, you can’t hate cancer!”

On second thought, that may earn a quipper a punch in the nose – in any culture.

Image: http://i2.listal.com/image/1184510/500full.jpg