The real cancer battle is to live well and fight despair
This week, a beautiful, talented broadcaster “lost her battle” with cancer. “I’m afraid,” said Rachael Bland on Twitter on Monday, “the time has come my friends… I’m told I’ve only got days.” By Wednesday, she was dead. She was 40. Her son, Freddie, is two.
She was 38 when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. I was 39. She lost her battle. I won mine. That’s because I’m a better fighter. I’m stronger. I’m braver. And when my cancer came back, I fought and won that battle again.
This, clearly, is a ridiculous view, but if we talk, as so many news outlets did this week, about fighting battles with cancer, it’s the only one we can take. If you fight a battle, you either win or lose. But I’m not an oncologist. It wasn’t me who decided which operations I should have, what dose of radiotherapy I should have, and which drugs I should take. I did what I was told and I was lucky. I was lucky, lucky, lucky. Rachael Bland also did what she was told, and she was not.
Forty years after Susan Sontag wrote her influential book Illness as Metaphor, it’s slightly depressing that we still have to remind people that cancer is not caused by lack of optimism. It’s caused by rogue cells that destroy normal body tissue. It would be nice if positive thinking cured it, but it doesn’t.
This doesn’t mean that there are no battles to fight – that we have no control and that living or dying is just a matter of chance. We have known for years that smoking causes cancer. We now know that diet plays a part, and so does alcohol, and so does lack of exercise. If we don’t want to get cancer in the first place, we could do far worse than to lay off the KFC and the chianti. No, carrots won’t excise a tumour, but eating a healthy diet will make us less likely to die. For society as a whole, encouraging this is a long, slow war of attrition.
Then there is the battle to live well, even in the face of a deadly diagnosis. Rachael Bland seems to have been an awful lot more positive than I was. She laughed a lot on her chart-topping podcast, You, Me and the Big C. She was often funny in her award-winning blog, Big C. Little Me. She certainly did, as the blog’s strapline put it, “put the can in cancer”. She did way more in an average week than most of us do without it. In the end, those little cells didn’t care. Yet I’m sure it made a difference to her, her loved ones and her many fans.
Bland was fit, positive and, yes, a fighter. She fought the real battle that everyone with cancer fights: the battle against despair. There are no prizes for winning it and no rules that say you have to fight it. But she did, and she did it with grace, wit and verve. By doing so she showed us that the only battle that finally counts is how you live your one, precious life.
Christina Patterson’s memoir The Art of Not Falling Apart is published by Atlantic