Healing Words
These days, everybody’s out of the cancer closet! While celebrities host glitzy fundraisers, average folks tick off the names of their friends—one in every six or eight over the age of 40—who have received a carcinogenic wake-up call. I even know healthy young people who expect that they will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives.
Most of us are unaware that our reactions to the growing cancer scourge are influenced by media messages funded by our government, health-care providers and drug companies. Certainly, these messages promote early screening, which saves lives, including mine. (A routine mammogram two years ago led to a mastectomy, and a return to health.) However, these seemingly benign communications also pacify a population experiencing an epidemic.
Endorsements from glamour patients make the point that cancer indiscriminately affects all. They don’t, however, hint at the inequities in the quality of health care received by people of different income levels and races. These inequities substantially dictate who will live longer (and who will die sooner.) How-to-have-chemo booklets display happy clients and beautiful nature scenes rather than hairless folks hunkered over their toilets. They don’t acknowledge that our mainstream treatments are “sacrifice of tissue” (surgery), and chemicals and medicines that carry serious health risks. They don’t address the reality that many people die prematurely of cancer each year, or that our grandchildren may face incidence rates of 1 in 3 or 4. They don’t question why our government is reluctant to fund significant environmental research or regulate pollution, even though most research suggests that long-term exposure to environmental toxins can cause cancer. Meanwhile, the conditions for a cancer explosion are building in the developing world. For all of us, lifestyle changes are desperately needed for healing and prevention.
In addition, media mainstreaming of cancer distracts from the psychological and spiritual growth opportunities that it rightfully should provide. When you’re forced to acknowledge your mortality, profound existential questions tend to arise. How much dishonesty and suffering do I allow in my name? Do I want to participate in commercialism/pollution/war? What gift do I want to leave the world? What if diet and lifestyle could heal me? What if my thoughts could create my experience? Am I investing myself in what brings me the greatest joy? What am I grateful for? How would I live if I were more conscious right now?
While flipping through magazines in a sickeningly cheery waiting room as I waited for a biopsy, a subscription renewal card for O Magazine caught my attention. “Live your best life, every day, every way,” it read. Although the sentiment struck me as slightly hokey, it also resonated with a power I could not deny. I now keep it taped to my car’s odometer, a constant reminder to me of the gift of sickness, death and loss—the fragile beauty of impermanence.
Impermanence is, of course, a concept that medical advertisers avoid. Their business is marketing drugs and institutions, not encouraging thoughtful societal or personal responses to the cancer crisis. “I have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me,” intones the Kaiser Permanente actress who enjoys relaxing walks on the beach, fun times learning to play the guitar and radiation treatments. Sometimes, what a message doesn’t tell you is far more dangerous than what it does.
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Diane Dodge lives in a co-housing community in Berkeley and runs a nonprofit for teenagers. To read an expanded version of Beyond the Spin, go to www.myspace.com/getouttadodgeproductions.
Healing Words
Scars | by Wichita Sims
My Beating Heart | by Gail Coufal
Harmonica Lessons | by Susan English Fetcho
Beyond the Spin | By Diane Dodge
