Of Dragons and Garden Peas

I've been in a minor funk these past few days, waiting for a bit of certainty on my course of treatment that just hasn't come yet. But I'm feeling better now...

During my downtime at home, I'm slowly getting caught up on my backlog of various magazines. I'm in the middle of my March 27, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, which features a fabulous article by humorist Calvin Trillin that is a remembrance of his wife Alice Stewart Trillin, who died in 2001 (the article is not online - check it out at your local library). Alice was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1976 (she was a non-smoker) and had surgery and radiation therapy, was given a 10 percent change of surviving two years, then went on to live for another 25 years before dying from heart complications brought on by the very radiation that had given her those extra years of life.

I see a lot of myself in Alice (or a lot of Alice in me): she was a ridiculous optimist about her situation, although at times she needed help to have the courage to wait (this companion article from the New Yorker about a potential recurrence episode evokes shades of what Sarah and I are going through right now -- waiting for the experts to confer and come to a decision on treatment). She also penned a renowned essay for the New England Journal of Medicine in 1981 entitled "Of Dragons and Garden Peas" (you'll have to dig it out of a medical library if you want to read it) in which she describes the fear of mortality embedded in a cancer diagnosis as a dragon which haunts her existence. She went on to say that cancer survivors sometimes feel like knights who have slain their dragons, but "we all know that the dragons are never quite dead and might at any time be aroused, ready for another fight."

Still, through all of this, Calvin writes, Alice felt that:

[T]he meaure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.

Just like Beth Brophy writes in her Breast Cancer blog, this sentiment hits the nail on the head for me. I think (and tell me if my perceptions are incorrect) that during this part of my life, I've continued to just be "Frank", not "Frank, who (in a hushed voice) has/had cancer". Yes, I have changed, but no more than anybody else changes over the course of a year. My walk with cancer is not a primary defining part of my nature, something that I dwell on constantly. It almost hearkens back to some of the trite expressions I would hear ad nauseam after 9/11: "If we stop [insert here something that we normally did before 9/11], then the terrorists have already won."

...if I give up being a pilot, then the cancer has already won...
...if I lose my sense of humor, then the cancer has already won...
...if I stop performing and enjoying music, then the cancer has already won...

You get the idea. Yet I haven't necessarily had to concentrate on being myself, I've just been that way. We often hear in the media and feel-good chicken-soupy books about those folks who turn cancer into some sort of spiritual rebirthing experience, giving them a new lease on life and an impetus to live their lives to the full. You don't always hear about the ones for whom cancer was just a bump in the road or a pebble in their shoe and for whom life just goes on. Maybe we should.