Reaction Paper on The Rhetoric of Cancer, a BBC Podcast

                I’ve become used to hearing people talk about cancer as some sort of battle, where the cancer patient is a brave, strong warrior, fighting against an entity that’s taking over his/her body. At the same time, I’ve also learned that cancer cells are actually cells that are produced by our own bodies, abnormal cells that never went through the normal cell’s life cycle, multiplying and sucking nutrition until the body gives up. I went on accepting these two things as they are. That was until this podcast challenged me to see these two things as pieces that don’t fit.

                Since cancer cells are cells that were once part of your body, shouldn’t battling against cancer mean waging a war against yourself?

                This was the question that remained in my mind the most as I listened through the recording.

                In the podcast ‘The Rhetoric of Cancer’, the speaker Andrew Graystone, who was also diagnosed with cancer, was “struggling to find a good language to describe what was going on”. He said that he found most of the words used as a “masculine, military-sort of language”. He went to ask various people who had an encounter with cancer to discover the rhetoric that they use to talk about this condition.  

                He first went to meet Dr. Wendy Makin, a Macmillan consultant in palliative care and oncology in Christie Hospital in Manchester, where Graystone got his cancer treatment. Dr. Makin said that “media sensationalism” would be mostly behind the phrases “losing the battle against cancer”. She said that the phrase may also be used by the patient’s family, friends and relatives to recognize the person’s bravery in dealing with his/her cancer. What struck Andrew the most was the phrase “living alongside cancer” that Dr. Makin used, which is quite contrary to the disproportionate fear of cancer that the media have instilled in the public. I think I agree with Graystone’s view that this whole thing against cancer is like a “bogeyman that we have created”. He also made me believe that cancer ought to be seen differently, that seeing it as an enemy would be declaring a civil war in your body. Nobody should hate their own body.

                He then met with Natasha Hill at Cancer Research UK to find out what language they use to convince people to support cancer research. According to Hill, they adopted a stance where they view cancer as an enemy, turning it into a “thing that you want to fight directly”. The people generally liked this way of campaigning, though Hill and her co-workers use a different language when addressing elderly patients. I listened as the two gave their opposing views about cancer: while Andrew said that he didn’t want to fight a part of his body (he said that he couldn’t fight his cancer), Natasha said that to most cancer patients, viewing cancer as some sort of enemy is like a motivation for them to stay strong with the treatments, a source of will that eventually help them survive. She has a point—cancer cells may be a part of our body, but the fact that these cells are working against us should be reason for us to keep them from doing so.

                Graystone also went to University of Birmingham’s School of Cancer Sciences to talk with Professor Michael Overduin. Out of all the interviews he did, Overduin’s was the one I liked the most. 

                Their talk focused on the small proteins that are involved in how cells grow and multiply. As scientists, according to him, they study how these molecules work, how they behave and how to stop them from misbehaving (like in the case of cancer). The idea of a battle, according to Professor Overduin, is a peculiar one, because scientists tend to be objective. But since they work alongside companies who make “warheads” against cancer, they use the term “warheads” as metaphors to refer to drug molecules that attack a certain “target”, a specific protein, while avoiding all the other 20,000 proteins that are functioning properly. The use of metaphors adds drama according to him, to the dry terms of science, and it also simplifies things. Graystone understood when Overduin said it’s “difficult to be at war against yourself” and how it seemed “counterintuitive, almost wrong”. It’s an interesting thing how the scientists view the whole thing as a series of proteins, away from the negative labels and metaphors, how they see proteins as “switches” that should be either turned on or turned off, and how they work together. Instead, Andrew suggested an orchestra as another analogy, that when one instrument goes out of tune, the scientists “fix” or “tune” them to make the symphony sound beautiful again.

                  The last visit was with Jim Cotter, a poet and a priest who was diagnosed with leukaemia. He told of an analogy of cancer about his bone marrow being like a garden invaded by weeds, with the treatment being like a weed killer, but this “weed killer” destroys the whole garden. So in this view, neither the body nor the cells are getting the better of the battle, but ultimately according to Cotter, he had to choose which side he was on. He then gave another analogy of seeing cancer and normal cells as dark and light angels, where the dark angels (cancer) serve as a messenger of death to him. Graystone even added that if anyone says that he lost his battle with cancer, he would personally come and haunt them!

                All in all, I appreciated every analogy that they used in describing cancer (including Andrew’s hitchhiker analogy at the end), and it made me wonder more at this phenomenon of the body. Why do I feel as if these cells in our body have this element that they can use to “self-destruct” people? Why do they suddenly become deadly and kill you from the inside? Is this a reminder of the limits of being human? Something that will always mean that there are things far from our control?

(by 2013-71244)