Should we be surprised when we are told we have cancer?
When I was told, it shocked me to the very core of my being.
But living with incurable cancer has made me reflect on why I was so stunned.
Surely, this was almost inevitable.
Why me?
You have every right to ask – cancer is as personal as it gets.
But there is another response: why not me?
They say that 1 in 2 of us will get cancer in our lifetime. Some say 1 in 3. These are simplistic numbers and it depends where you look but the stats aren’t great and so for many of us it’s only a matter of time.
It’s also a matter of evolution. We are not immortal. If it isn’t cancer then something else will get us first – we are not indestructible. Our cells begin to betray us. Biology trumps everything.
Jarle Breivik tells us in his book, Making Sense of Cancer
The fundamental problem is that all cells in our body are slowly but surely evolving toward cancer.
In essence what are we?
Jarle is quite clear on this: “We are temporary cell colonies that the genes have made to get to the next generation.”
Basically, we are multicellular organisms and temporary vessels to propagate germ cells.
If this sounds weird then it’s worth thinking of ourselves as partly human, a colony within a colony within a colony. That sounds weirder still but according to James Gallagher, only 43% of the body’s total cell are made up of human cells as everything else are microscopic colonists.
Quite simply, we have not been designed to keep on going. We have been designed to self-destruct and it is a natural disease of aging. We all have a mortal soma.
Is that really a surprise?
I don’t think it is when we seek to understand cancer from an evolutionary perspective and see it as a disease heavily dependent of evolutionary principles and ecological relationships (Casás-Selves and DeGregori, 2013).
Not everyone agrees with this “natural disease of aging” perspective highlighting the preventability of 90 to 95% of cancers (Anand et al, 2008).
But I’m not so sure, these just accelerate the process. The lifestyle and environmental changes we make will indeed have an impact but the longer we live, the more likely it is we will die of the same cancer or another cancer.
We get cancer by living our lives. It is a consequence of natural biological processes and the gradual lifelong accumulation of diverse forms of unrepaired molecular and cellular damage in our bodies.
I gravitate back to Jarle Breivik’s insights and his view that “Cancer is a consequence of how the body is organised…We are flowers that eventually wither and die.”
No one wants to hear that they are on a path to self-destruction but cancer cells evolve and cancer development is related to the evolution of the species.
Our genes have programmed the cells and us to die. The harsh reality is that our cells accumulate mutations and they go crazy.
Doesn’t sound terribly optimistic all this does it? Well, no it isn’t but I don’t think any of us are kidding ourselves thinking we are going to live forever. Even better treatment isn’t going to make cancer go away, it just delays it as ageing is unstoppable.
We are not supposed to live forever but that doesn’t mean we have to stop living when we are told we have the disease. The emotional response we give to getting the news “it’s cancer” is where our optimism can still find a place.
Life does not immediately stop when you have cancer, it carries on and rather than mourn a life lost or the many things you still haven’t done, my approach is to keep on living the best way I can. This is part of the circle of life.
When we make cancer the enemy, we make an enemy of ourselves. It’s part of who we are and so we live with it and enjoy the life we have for the time we are privileged to have it.
Newsflash: life is not fair so that means actually we all do succumb to something sooner or later and suffering is universal. The odds are stacked against every single one of us.
It’s nothing personal, it’s life, it’s non-discriminatory so we have to get over it and learn to live with to the best of our ability.
We have to flip the narrative so that we aren’t housing ourselves in a bunker of self-mourning with nothing to oxygenate our worldview.
Confronting your own mortality is not for the faint-hearted but it is essential for controlling the fear associated with a disease that has been monstrously misunderstood. It’s part of our own ecosystem.