Many cancer patients and patient advocates have written against the “warrior” rhetoric associated with the disease. Employing such rhetoric can make those dealing with cancer feel they are failing and letting people down during especially hard times. It can make terminally ill patients feel that they are weak, or giving up, by deciding to choose palliative care options without undergoing another series of painful treatments that could only marginally prolong their lives. And it also contains the unintended but pernicious implication that those who don’t live as long simply didn’t fight hard enough.
A member of my extended family died with glioblastoma four Julys ago. He was a man who was born in a Stalin-era gulag, where he spent his early childhood. A victim of anti-Semitism, he fled the Soviet Union for Israel with his mom as a teenager and served as a soldier during the Yom Kippur War. He eventually immigrated to the United States, where he built a family. Possessing a rare combination of grit and cheerfulness, his formative experiences made him unflappable during events in life that others would have considered crises. When diagnosed, he took it in stride and tried every treatment available to him — surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, clinical trials — and he even dabbled in homeopathy. At every step, his loving and supportive family was at his side. But he passed away 20 months after his diagnosis. And it wasn’t because he was less courageous, or had any less fight in him, or had a worse attitude, than somebody with the disease who might have hung on for a few more years.
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