“Praying for Joe Biden and his family to defeat the cancer.” — California Representative Ro Khanna
Joe Biden will not defeat the cancer. Nor will the cancer defeat Joe Biden. Prostate cancer is not an opponent and there is no scorecard. The notion of “defeating cancer” is a lesion in our language and our national psyche that does damage to both the inflicted and their loved ones. There is no war when it comes to cancer — no winners, no losers, no ties. There is just reality.
One surrenders to the emperor of all maladies and the exigencies of modern medicine. One has neither the energy nor expertise to do otherwise. Hell, the testing alone will deplete body and soul. After suspicious signs are discovered, one follows orders even if one’s natural tendencies are to buck the system. Blood samples are followed by X-rays and biopsies and CT scans and PET scans and M.R.I.s; experts then attack, dissect, radiate, poison, and starve your unhappy cells, nodes, and tumors.
That you are no longer in control of your body, if you ever thought you were, becomes clearer as you forge alliances with strangers who are, by profession, oncologists, surgeons, nurses, technicians, radiologists, dietitians, and therapists; they, in turn, will poke, prod, puncture, inspire, guide, chide, warn, encourage, and deliver truths that may or may not be of any comfort. Surveillance is ongoing. Surrender is hard work.
You may lose your hair, your hope, your appetite, your social life, your sporting life, and your sex life, but you will not lose the battle. There is no battle. There is treatment. The doctors — possessing all the tools, all the algorithms — are like Vegas oddsmakers who have studied past performances and figure out your best bets moving forward; they guarantee nothing and freely admit they rely on percentages to estimate the outcome.
“Joe is a fighter,” wrote Kamala Harris immediately after Biden’s diagnosis. And Bill Clinton posted, “My friend Joe Biden’s always been a fighter.” Senator John Fetterman added, “Joe has been a fighter his whole life. He will prevail.”
No, Joe Biden will not prevail. There is no prevailing with cancer. There is only compliance. And perhaps remission. The posts make it sound as if Joe Biden had just inked a pay-per-view deal to go seven rounds with Mike Tyson. Fight? Defeat? Prevail?
To highlight the absurdity of “fighting cancer,” let’s look at another Joe, a professional boxer named Joe Frazier, who defeated Muhammad Ali in what was called “the Fight of the Century.” Frazier knocked down Ali in the last of 15 brutal rounds to capture the crown. No one ever questioned Frazier’s courage or fortitude or discipline. And yet the first line of his 2011 AP obituary was: “Joe Frazier died Monday night after a brief final fight with liver cancer.” Fight? Defeat? Prevail?
The cancer had been diagnosed one month before. Of Smokin’ Joe Frazier’s 37 heavyweight bouts, he lost only four. Or five . . . if you fall into the trap of comparing cancer to Muhammad Ali or George Foreman.
Because cancer is not contagious, not spread by pathogens or contact or pandemic, each patient has to own his or her condition. There is no finger-pointing. Some degree of shame and guilt are inexorable. “I must have smoked or drunk too much, eaten unwisely, exercised insufficiently, worked too hard, loved incompletely, neglected checkups, or mangled my truest emotions into this sorry state. And if I should succumb to this disease, or suffer a recurrence, the unspoken notion will be that I did not fight doggedly enough, or I chose the wrong hospital or the wrong protocol or, God forbid, the wrong God.”
”President Biden knows that when you get knocked down, you get back up and fight.” — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker
There are approximately 200 common cancers, plus subcategories, and another couple hundred rare cancers. That’s what the medical community has gleaned after all the funding and all the research and all the dying since the year 420 B.C., when Hippocrates, the father of medicine, removed the first recorded tumor (naming it cancer because the growth had claws that resembled a crab).
As longevity escalates, so too do cancer occurrences; it is axiomatic that the longer we live, the greater the likelihood of cancer. To make matters worse, however, young adults are now, inexplicably, getting certain cancers at higher rates, with more lethal results. Millennials have twice the risk of colon cancer and four times the risk of rectal cancer than did Boomers. It took just one generation to spike so dramatically. The future is not rosy.
Cancer has killed more people than wars and famines and all natural disasters. That is not to say detection and treatment have not improved exponentially, and if you are diligent and your stars are aligned, your cancer may be arrested and sent into hiding and lurk just outside the gates of good fortune for an unknown span of time. Still, despite the sharp decrease in smoking, more and more people are getting cancers and dying from them. Half the babies born on planet earth today will develop a cancer. In America, one in two women, one in three men.
Being “the victor or the vanquished” would be laughable if not so cruel. The sooner we stop pitting humans against an ancient deadly disease, stop using inapposite metaphors, the better off we’ll be. You don’t hear about your friends fighting atrial fib or psoriasis or plantar fasciitis; they cope with Parkinson’s and C.O.P.D.; they deal with M.S. and Alzheimer’s. You would no sooner square off with a cancer than a wicked northeaster: Once spotted on the radar screen, you batten down the hatches, consult the experts, gather supplies, follow the playbook, lean on your community, and do your best. You don’t fight weather. You don’t blame its victims and you don’t put the onus on the stricken.
Ten million people around the world will die from various cancers this year; 618,000 of them will be Americans. The vast majority will have suffered valiantly and behaved heroically. Do you really want to call them losers?
Best of luck, Joe.
Bruce Buschel is a writer who lives in Bridgehampton.