Say what?
Comprehending the components of cancer is hard. Conquering the confusion requires delving into the murky dark deep of biology, genetics, clinical medicine, medical economics, psychology, maybe nutrition, and sometimes medical research processes. Can't "cancierges" make cancer-coping communication (and courage) come more easily for their loved one?
Yes. How? With a tool that we all -already- deploy: metaphors and analogies.
For example, building construction.
Last week my cancer-challenged kin called her upcoming radiation regime "spot-welding." Renaming external beam radiation with a better-understood, previously-observed, mentally accessible repair process, shrinks the bogeyman. Just like the zapping should shrink her T9 vertebra and femur tumors.
Consider how construction resembles cancer care. The oncologist can be viewed as a specialist architect, responsible for remediation of a beloved, but troubled, usually aging structure. Surgeons are carpenters, crafting and carving carefully-measured piece-parts and their connections. The structural engineers who calculate stress burdens, weight loads, and other amalgams of architectural math and physics, where are they? They're beavering in the back rooms, working as medical physicists, handling dosimetry calculations, delivered as key parameters to radiation oncologists.
above: Got your hard-hat on, to allow you on the heavy-lifting, occasional-accidents site of cancer-remediation body-building?
Presumably radiologists want more respect than being renamed termite inspectors. Yes, cardiologists merit more consideration than hearing themselves labeled "HVAC subcontractors." Best avoid the obvious linkage of urologists and plumbers!
But there can be respect and appreciation, in calling cancer care another form of fixing fading buildings. If "the body is a temple," then it's respectful to re-name cancer medical professionals "specialist church architects."
And cancer caregivers can be the architects of patient confidence, of their loved ones living more comfortably in the complex but durable construct of their bodies.
above: Once an old moviehouse, now an overhauled, bustling natural foods restaurant. To what heights will you aspire in your cancer-caregiving?
P.S.: All of us over 50, don't forget your plumbing system quality check (how not to say "colonoscopy")? And adult women, don't delay those regular furnace filter changes, periodic repainting, and life-saving mammograms and self-exams!
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