When you have cancer then it’s important to adopt a positive outlook.
It helps to be stubborn.
It helps to be a contrarian and an outlier.
It helps to have a soupçon of Micawberian optimism.
It helps to have it by the bucketful too.
In Charles Dickens’s novel, David Copperfield, there is a character called Wilkins Micawber, an eternal optimist known for saying that “something will turn up”.
His brand of optimism was to look into the face of financial adversity with hope in his eyes.
Constantly in debt and penury, Mr. Micawber maintained an optimistic, if totally ‘disconnected from reality’ disposition, but he kept hoping his fortunes would take a turn for the better.
His world view was “a happy augury that something extraordinary is bound to turn up.”
Note, not just something will turn up but ‘something extraordinary’! This was his hourly expectation too!
It is little surprise therefore to learn of his motto:
My motto has always been “nil desperandum”: in short, never despair.
The Micawber mentality is a magnificent guiding principle to have especially when treatment options might be limited or, like me, you’ve been told you’re incurable.
With cancer, there has to be a Micawberian streak within us that says something will turn up, something extraordinary.
Exercising a habitually optimistic point of view and acting on the Micawber principle helps us deal with uncertainty and keeps our spirits high.
But isn’t Micawberian optimism something that drives the human race regardless of our personal health issues?
We are all hoping that something will turn up to better our situations and make our lives happier. We all want the extraordinary.
And the extraordinary does happen.
When I was told my cancer was incurable, I was still given a chance. I had chemotherapy which initially started to work but then it didn’t and the cancer grew. It really didn’t help that my treatment was actually stopped during lockdown. I was one of those Stage IV scrapheap patients that weren’t prioritised because I was palliative.
But, I still had this Micawberian mindset within me.
I kept saying to myself that “something will turn up” and it did. A new treatment was just starting to be used and I qualified for it!
Immunotherapy was the new kid on the block and I was to be given that. I was told it was a ‘slow burner’ and there was no real way of knowing whether I’d respond.
But respond I did and that’s all thanks to Nivolumab (sold under the brand name Opdivo), a drug that unleashes the immune system so that it destroys cancer.
For me, something truly extraordinary turned up.
It has for lots of other people around the world too as immunotherapy is now becoming a first-line treatment.
There are now lots of different immunotherapies including monoclonal antibodies, checkpoint inhibitors, and vaccines.
There are higher hopes that other treatments will ‘turn up’ as thousands of clinical trials of various combinations of new and already approved immunotherapies are underway.
Paradigm-shifting cancer treatments and combination treatments could possibly save you as they have saved me.
“Something will turn up” sounds naïve and Panglossian but we have to keep the faith, we have to believe that there is something out there with our name on it!
It’s worth remembering that the new treatments we have now weren’t initially taken all that seriously and we have people like Nobel Prize winners Dr Jim Allison and Professor Tasuku Honjo to thank for persisting, being contrarian and silencing the naysayers.
They kept at it and despite many setbacks knew something would turn up.
What is wrong with being recklessly cheery and blindly optimistic?
Nothing! We can inject some of this hopeful spirit into our own futures and say that better things are definitely on their way.
If we choose to think that the best is yet to come, it will!
In the words of the eternal optimist Mr Micawber,
I am hourly expecting something extraordinary to turn up.
I’m doing the same.