The missing pieces of cancer puzzle
Recently I have lost too many friends to cancer, and have friends currently fighting the battle.
Yet all of them are relatively young and follow good health practices: eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise, etc.
Seeing them suffer not just physically but emotionally especially when they first receive the bad news of having cancer, during the time of treatment and eventually going through the end journey of their lives set me thinking there must be something else that the rest of us can and should do.
And there is. I hope that what I share here will serve as food for thought and encourage you to find out more.
Understanding
We are all busy. Our modern lifestyles mean that so many things especially our own physical needs and understanding our own bodies don’t get our attention until the situation is critical. And by then, the best we can do is patch things up and make do.
We’ve all heard of cancer, and sadly, some of us have experienced it directly. But how much do we really know?
The problem is that most of us stop listening when we hear the word “cancer”. We skip ahead to “What can I do about it and how can I fix it?” Few doctors educate patients on what it is. Instead, giving a broad description of what it does when you get it, how they plan to treat it and how long you might live.
Every single person has mutated cells within the body which have the potential of becoming cancerous. As one doctor rightly pointed out, for all the threats that cancer poses, the truth is that most of us know more about 1970s sitcoms than we really know about cancer.
Had we all been educated earlier on what cancer is, we would be more inclined to embrace it as a normal function and react in a calmer manner. Being educationally aware of what originally caused the action better equips us to understand and manage the mutation or growing process of cancer before it extends its growth.
Prioritising our health is difficult when so many other pressing issues are constantly needing our attention. Often, we take good health for granted. What is most important is to find out more and get prepared, so that when the time comes, we know that we are in better control of the situation rather than leaving it entirely in the hands of the healthcare professionals.
Quietness
I recently lost a close friend of more than 40 years to lung cancer. To find some solace, I went to the library and “Not the Last Goodbye” by David Servan-Scheiber caught my eye. This is an enlightening memoir by a doctor who died of a recurring brain cancer.
At his first diagnosis, David began writing a book called “Anti-Cancer”. He became so engrossed in his research, and found it so rewarding that he often forgot about his own needs. David suggests in his later work that a prolonged stress and his reluctance to rest and recuperate may well have led to his final diagnosis.
Of his own ordeal, he said that failing to find and maintain inner calm was one of his greatest regrets. David believed that quietness may be the most important element of all in cancer prevention and cure. Meditation, cardiac coherence exercises, a balanced lifestyle, etc. can all provide inner calm. He ranked the importance of physical exercise and a nutritious well-balanced diet after inner calm.
One of his subjects, Molly, had been living with stage four cancer for about a decade. David asked, what was her secret for keeping the disease at bay? “It’s the quiet. The quiet protects me.” She said, speaking of her daily walks on the banks of a lake.
Today is Good Friday. While writing about inner calm, a beautiful hymn “It is well with my soul” came to mind. It was written by Horatio Spafford, a successful lawyer and businessman in Chicago, in 1873 en route to Cardiff, Wales to find his grieving wife. This song was composed when the ship he was travelling in was at the spot where all four of Spafford’s children were drowned in a ship accident. At that moment, he stepped into the cabin and wrote this beautiful song to seek solace from his grief.
In focusing all our preventative and curative efforts on diet and exercise, we are sitting on a very wobbly two-legged stool. Add two legs, "understanding" and "quietness", and we create a stronger and more reliable seat.
Do drop me a note if you’d like to know more about how art therapy can provide inner calm.