Why EVERYONE Should Care About Cancer
Two weeks after my ovarian cancer debulking surgery and two days before getting the surgical staples removed from my abdomen, January 2019
A few weeks after I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I started posting about it on social media. I wanted to share my experiences with others who were going through similar things, but I also wanted to show everyone, including those who hadn’t been personally affected by cancer, what it was really like to go through treatment.
Prior to being diagnosed, I didn’t know a lot about cancer, and I knew nothing about ovarian cancer. My idea of what it was like to go through cancer treatment came from ‘80s movies of bald, emaciated women sprawled on bathroom floors, heaving into the toilet bowl. Chemo I imagined as a row of straight-backed chairs, like you’d find in an HR waiting room, with cancer patients hooked up to IV poles all lined up next to each other. I pictured it being painfully, mind-numbingly boring to sit there all day as the drugs dripped into your veins, if I pictured it at all.
Cancer treatment, actual cancer treatment, was both better and worse than I ever imagined—both more excruciatingly painful and more heartbustingly joyful.
But as a society, we don’t know this. And we don’t want to know. Because when someone gets sick, we look away. And on the flip side, often when people get sick, they go into hiding.
If someone gets sick, sometimes they’ll disappear, emerging only after they’re better. Or sometimes, they never emerge at all.
One reason it’s hard to know about family medical history is that in previous generations, people didn’t talk about illness. Try digging around in your family a generation or two back and you’ll probably find this. Case in point: While I was asking around trying to determine my family medical history after I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I found out that a relative in my grandparents’ generation had been rumored to have had “a little breast cancer,” but we were never able to confirm that one way or the other.
With each generation, we’re getting better at letting go of shrouding illness and disease in absolute secrecy, but societally, we still have a long way to go in releasing the stigma and fear that causes people to hide their illnesses from the outside world—and causes the outside world to actually really not want to know, anyway.
So, unless we’ve been personally touched by cancer in ourselves or a close loved one, we have the option, we have the luxury, of looking away. Of pretending this isn’t about us, and it doesn’t affect us.
But what we don’t know—what we keep at arm’s length and remain in blissful ignorance about—we fear. And the way to dispel the fear is to open our eyes and take a close look.
That is why I wanted to show what it was like—what it was really like—to go through cancer treatment, in unflinching, honest, gritty detail. The bright, blinding fear like I’d never experienced right before surgery; the pain so bad afterwards I can’t even remember it. The love and joy and fun present at the infusion center where I got my chemo treatments; facing my own mortality that first night in the ER when I was hospitalized and diagnosed, thinking my life might be over at 43 years old and I could be at the very end.
We like to think that we’re invincible and immune to hardship, illness, and disease. But statistics tell a different story: One in two men and one in three women are at risk for developing cancer in their lifetimes. That means that in our lifetimes, we will all likely be touched, in some way, by cancer, in ourselves or our loved ones. In the meantime, we might as well get comfortable with what we are uncomfortable with—illness and disease—so we can understand what others are facing, and expand our capacity for empathy and compassion.
Open your eyes. Come closer. LOOK.
