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I Do Not Feel Like a Cancer Survivor -- And That Is Probably a Good Thing. Or Fund the NIH/NFS [1]

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Date: 2025-01-30

To forestall any worry (or joy. Hey, hate reading is a thing.) from long time readers: no, the cancer has not returned that I am aware of.

In a couple of days, I am going to have a CT scan roughly six months after my cancer treatment concluded. This is a normal part of the treatment process and something that I will do, if there are no signs of cancer (and, again, I was completely clean at three months and have no symptoms, so there is little reason to think anything has changed) at increasing intervals until something kills me. Hopefully something epic like choking on soft-serve ice cream or a brain hemorrhage brought on by being hit in the head with a fluffy pillow. If your death cannot be epic, then at least you should hope for epically stupid. This process, my oncologist assures me, is standard for survivors.

I found his choice of words weird. I don’t feel like a survivor, or at least like the cultural tells me a survivor is supposed to feel like. I worked at a cancer research hospital, the charity arm, for about a year. We celebrated, constantly, the people who had survived the most harrowing of the treatments. Our ads were filed with the people undergoing the most debilitating of protocols. The only thing our marketing seemed to celebrate more than people who survived a harrowing treatment plan was those who succumbed to the most hideous of the cancers. (As an aside — don’t work in the marketing arm of a charity. It will make you unbelievably angry.)

That was not me.

My experience was much kinder, much gentler. I went to the hospital, I went to sleep. I woke up. The cancer was gone. In less than a week I was home. In less than two months, my guts had mostly acclimatized to their new configuration. They ran some blood tests and some genetic tests and determined that, despite it being stage two colon cancer and my relative youth, I did not need chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Frankly, my run in with the infection and blood clot in my brain a couple months after the surgery beat me up, and scared me, more than the cancer did.

I did not suffer in the way that television and movies teach us that cancer survivors must suffer. To me, it was something that happened, like the leg I broke as a child (pro tip to all you six-year-olds out there: do not jump on a full, spinning merry go round. You will bounce off and get caught under the mechanism, shattering your ankle. You are welcome) or the back problems I encountered when I got run over as a teenager (I swear, I am not a Looney tunes character), and I moved on from.

This is not to say there have been no ill effects. I am not the same person, physically, as I was before the cancer. But I am improving, and I suspect a lot of the worst issues stem from the two weeks I spent bedridden in the hospital because of the infection and blood clot and the subsequent month-long treatment. But overall, I did not experience the pain, discomfort, and sickness that we traditionally associate with cancer survivors.

This is a good thing.

It means, at least for the kind of cancer I have, that science has advanced to the point that cancer, the ultimate scourge, can be treated like a broken knee or tonsilitis. We can have it, and then not have it, with relatively easy treatments. This is fantastic. We often talk about survival rates, but we also need to celebrate quality of life improvements in treatment as well. It is good to survive. It is better to survive easily. It is better still to survive easily and suffer very little. We need to celebrate all three of outcomes. It is good that you don’t need to be brave or tough or special to survive cancer.

Which is why the freezing of the NIH/NSF funding infuriates me so. The scientists funded by and/or working at those organizations do both fundamental and practical research that contributes to the kinds of treatments that I benefited from. I want the next person who has stage two colon cancer to survive with even less discomfort than I did, and I want the next person with stage four colon cancer to have as easy a time surviving their cancer as I did mine. Stopping the work that leads to those kinds of breakthroughs is monstrous. Putting aside the obvious illegality of it and the obvious ways in which it is unconstitutional, it is simply evil.

We should not be afraid to call the people who instigated and participated in that abomination the evil monsters that they are. And they should know that the best moments left to them will be when we, the survivors, outlive them and get to stand on their graves and tramp the dirt down.

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