With your body, anyway. And hopefully with someone you love, but that’s a different blog!

So anyway, I’ve been pondering this war/survivor/cancer fight stuff a lot. It just feels wrong to me. And then, I was thinking that I was actually looking forward to my chemo yesterday, because it meant I was doing something to treat my disease, and I was getting through it pretty well, and I am 3/4 of the way through. I should finish in mid-July.

I told my oncologist this and he said that so many patients look at just the toxic elements of chemotherapy. And yes, it is a bunch of poison being loaded into your body. But this is how we treat the disease. We don’t know quite enough to single out individual cancer cells and kill them off. Not yet. Maybe someday, as medicine, like everything else, evolves. I remember Dr. McCoy on Star Trek talking about the brutality of 20th century medicine. He’d probably say the same about medicine in the early 21st. Remember how he’d just take that little metal thing and it would buzz, diagnose and treat? You didn’t remove a speck of clothing, either, or mess your hair.It probably rearranged the cells and made them happy again. We cringe when we think about the brutality of 19th century medicine – no handwashing, little anesthetic, no idea of sterile procedure. Medicine has certainly progressed since then. Although people still need to wash their hands. And if you live in the US you have to fight with your insurance to cover your treatments, it sounds a lot like a war. Haven’t had to deal with that in Switzerland yet. Yes, I know I digress. It’s part of my creativity. ;-p.

As I thought about this more, I was thinking of how this perspective (and I’m sure I’m not the first to think about it in this way) differs from a cancer as war perspective. When we think of cancer as war, and fighting, we are at war with our body. Well, the treatments are violent, they do involve the killing of cells. But I like to think of this as loving myself enough to care for myself, and to do what I need to to separate myself from my cancer, or potential cancer. And it’s still killing cells, but it’s more like separating out the potentially harmful cells and getting rid of them. Like trash removal. Or maybe organization where you get rid of what you don’t need. There’s nothing wrong with tossing stuff out. Maybe it’s not necessary to have a metaphor or an image, just think of it as loving yourself enough to take care of things. Although metaphors simplify the thought process – so there is a need to consider how we frame treatment processes and think about developing new metaphors – and maybe someone has already. I’ve not been trolling the literature these days.

I’m thinking about this more, and how it relates to cognitive processes. And there is a definite similarity between this and what the Health At Every Size and size acceptance movements say about body image. More about that too….

For now, though it’s enough to say that loving yourself is better than fighting a war inside your body.