In addition to having had cancer myself, I’ve had the misfortune of knowing far too many affected by cancer. My mother and father both succumbed to it – my mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of 54 when I was 25, and my father died five years later of lung cancer at 74.
After that relatively early loss in my life of both parents, I shirked from the word cancer. I didn’t want to hear about cancer, read about it, think about the possibility of ever encountering it again in life. Horribly, my parents had been offered up to the pagan cancer god and that god, now satiated by the blood of our parents, would forever pass over my sister and me. I didn’t consciously believe that, of course, but I did harbour some weird superstitious belief that so much bad luck must be sufficient to cover my bets for the better part of a long life.
I was wrong, of course. And that mistake has proven to be a hard but valuable lesson. When a terrible disease takes the life of someone close to you, it rattles you, and it may even deeply scar the remainder of your life. But it can’t really change the way you live your own life. The disease, the death that happened to another still happened to another. You may be shaken at first, but that trauma will fade surprisingly quickly from memory. Because it didn’t happen to you, the memory has been captured in your mind like an image on film, one that can easily fade; it hasn’t been captured within your psyche or, for lack of a better word, your soul. Experience it yourself – illness, I mean, of course, imminent death – and I can’t imagine how you can ever shake it from your being.
When faced with an illness that holds the power to kill you, you must face a decision that may prove surprisingly difficult to make. It wasn’t difficult for me, but it can be for others. And the more I encounter cancer among my family and friends as we all grow older, the more I discover how differently people can arrive at this decision. It isn’t as obvious as it was for me, and the reason why can be very different from one person to the next. But I believe it’s this decision that matters the most. Everything that will happen afterwards follows from this.
If you have the misfortune of being diagnosed with cancer, you must decide whether you will fight it. It isn’t enough to decide to fight. You must decide in such a way that you are convinced of your triumph. Anyone can agree to enter a fight with uncertainty of the outcome, only a willingness to fight. But with cancer, that isn’t enough. You must have the certainty that borders on faith. Once you have this, then I believe you hold the reigns and will find the right path. Without it and you become nothing more than a passive traveller, an itinerant on a journey that should belong to you but doesn't.
Once you choose to fight, you will make the decisions and you will maintain mastery over your fate. I chose to fight, and with my wife’s help, I embraced a diet that provided me with a tangible weapon to fight my disease. It scarcely mattered whether the diet really physically helped me in my fight or not; emotionally, it did. The diet gave me a sense of control over my destiny; it secured for me an active role in my fight for survival. Instead of turning my anger at my misfortune and my frustration with my pain into disobedience toward my doctors or my carers, I kept it directed at the cancer I intended to overcome. And in the end, I’m not sure how my diet was the most valuable to me, whether it was physically or emotionally; but what I am certain of is that the their combined power encompassed everything that I could bring to the fight.
Since winning the first round of my fight, I have seen others face similar battles. I’ve sadly and helplessly watched friends deteriorate when they lost or never found that will to fight. At the same time, I have seen many who faced far worse than I did overcome the illness and the treatment and just get on with it. They decided.
It wasn't just a diet that did it for me. My other stake in the ground concerned my dogged unwillingness to accept a feeding tube. Both my doctors recommended it; both advised that the treatment could very likely bring me to the verge of starvation as my throat, ravaged by the radiation, would no longer allow food to pass. But somehow I equated that feeding tube to capitulation and defeat; I’m not sure why. I think it may have had to do with what my mother endured and similar concessions as she slowly lost her fight. I stubbornly stuck to the belief that I must keep myself as whole as possible: I would not stand for a feeding tube; I would not lose my lymph nodes to surgery, either.
In the end, sitting in my oncologist’s office, basking briefly and cautiously in the glory of remission, my lymph nodes intact, I felt compelled to point out that I made it without the feeding tube. I will never forget his reply. He smiled and said, ‘sometimes it just takes sheer bloody-mindedness.’
You have to make that decision; Deny death outright — fight to live, refuse to die. If you don’t, you will almost certainly die far sooner than later. But if you do, you will have the fight of your life. And to fight it, you need sheer bloody-mindedness. Not only will it help you beat the cancer, but it will keep you alive – possibly obstreperous, probably cantankerous – hopefully for a very long time.
