Battle ...

[andy-hughes]

Following my post regarding the sad death of actress Mary Tamm, which do the media always refer to people as having 'lost a battle' with cancer, when they rarely apply that metaphor to any other cause of death?

I hope I never succomb to the disease, but I will not be impressed if anyone starts calling me 'brave' or talks of my 'battle'.

As far as I am concerned, I will 'have' cancer, which is a twenty-four carat bum deal, but i wont be 'battling' it, or being 'brave' - i will simply hang on as long as I can, and then peg it.

What do you think?

[Sqad]

Zeuhl.........LOL........

[andy-hughes]

I would feel the same way about this dreadful condition as i would about flue - I have got it, what happens is not especially in my hands as far as 'fighting' it goes.

I will sit here and be royally peed off about it, but that's not the same as 'fighting', which infers that there is actually something you can do about it - apart from the obvious for all medical conditions which is seek and receive treatment.

Other than that, it's a wait-and-see scenario.

[naomi24]

I think I’m about to disagree with practically everyone here. I have seen people ‘fight a battle’ with cancer, both as much as is physically possible, by for example, going abroad and paying for treatments unavailable in this country, and most certainly mentally – and I have known some incredibly brave cancer victims. Some won, but sadly, others didn’t.

[Zeuhl]

I think there was a study a few years back interviewing people with 'terminal cancer' diagnoses who were still alive years later.

A significant percentage of them fell into 3 groups;

never understood the doctor's diagnosis in the first place
didn't believe doctor
never trusted anything doctors said

One might assume the people who had died did understand, believe and respect what the doctors told them

which is a bit worrying when you add in the fact that many doctors err on the pessimistic side

[ummmm]

I agree with Naomi.

[andy-hughes]

naomi - i take your point, but my point is that a cancer death is routinely dsecribed in any media report as 'having lost a brave battle with cancer ...' which is not a phrase attached to virtually any other fatal condition.

I believe that anyone who is able to provide any kind of 'fight' against any illness, trivial to erminal -does so, on the basis that no-one likes being ill any longer than they have to.

But the notion of a 'brave fight' seems odd, as though you are somehow more dignified if you have 'fought and lost' against this one condition, as opposed to any of the myriad other situations that can result in death.

[Sqad]

Just to support the post of Andy above, in the 1940's 50's tuberculosis was a bigger killer than cancer and patients were in sanitoria undergoing all sorts of treatments for months and sometime years before succumbing to the deadly disease.

They always "died " of TB never "lost the battle" with TB.

[Zeuhl]

Thinking on this Cancer:Battle association.

I used to work with the son of Squadron Leader Bernard Robinson who founded the Marie Curie Memorial Foundation in 1948 - known today as Marie Curie Cancer Care.

Bernard Robinson spent part of WWII as an aide to Winston Churchill and always said he was inspired by a comment of Churchill's that the casualties from cancer were far worse than those caused by the Second World War.

[naomi24]

You say the media rarely apply the metaphor to any other form of illness, but I’ve just googled a couple of other serious conditions – MS and heart disease – and the words ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ are used in several articles. I think it’s just modern journalistic terminology applied to any life-threatening disorder. It's just a gentle way of saying someone's dead.