To Fight or Persevere

Fight or Perseverance

We hear a lot about fighting cancer and other illnesses. I think the “Think Pink” people who started the whole fighting breast cancer really pushed the idea for patients to fight the disease and not let it conquer them. People became cancer survivors. The pink ribbon - fight caner images have flooded the media over the decades.

This fighting attitude became expected especially among women going through breast cancer treatments. Women have made great gains in the working world, taking leadership roles such as Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart. It seemed it was expected that women could do it all, including fighting cancer or all the campaigns to fight FOR cancer research. We have heard it all the time that we can conquer cancer!

It’s been great for the all the advances that have been made in cancer treatments and especially breast cancer. Now we know so much more about different types of cancers and how they progress in different ages and genetic make ups of women (and men). Targeted therapies for each type of cancer give us five-year survival rates into the high 80 to low 90%. For ten years it may drop about 5-10%, but that is still good odds.

This “fighting attitude” may be a good thing at the onset to face what they have to go through, but is it sustainable for a patient going through it? Humans are created with a special fight or flight response built into us which give us an extra kick of adrenalin designed to get us out of the way of danger, or fight it. The challenge with many medical conditions is that they become chronic and one cannot maintain the “fight” forever. An initial fight is good but when do we switch to a steady-as-you-go pace that is long lasting?

The myth that has challenged me the most about breast cancer fighting is that once the initial treatments are over- you are good to go!  Right? You did it! This is far from the truth. It’s more like yes, you battled the monster and scared it away for now, but it left you beaten and scarred, bruised and worn, shaken and fearful for its return. Your body is not the same after the surgery, meds and radiation. You have to learn to do things differently. The meds leave you tired, in pain and weak. Yes, you may be “still standing” but sometimes, barely, it seems. This is where perseverance kicks in.

The clinicians are really good at getting you through the first phase of fighting because that is what they are trained at. They are trained to save lives! We need this, but the next stage of keeping you going can sometimes feel lost. How do we encourage your patients or your friends to keep the steady pace of a new life, and to not always fear the monster that might get them again.

The Webster dictionary defines perseverance as steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. It is interesting that the use of this word has decreased in our literature by 85% to what it was used 200 years ago (Google books). We do not talk about persevering through difficult times because we want and can sometimes get a quick fix to our problems. We’ve lost our ability to talk about persevering.  Those that need to keep going even when it is hard, lose the encouragement from this language shift. Life isn’t about quick fixes. We cannot always stop the pain from an illness (physical and mental), or from a loss of a family member or friend. Life does hurt and we do need to persevere through the tough times. We often need to find ways to walk through really hard things that may never go away but will remain with us for the rest of our lives. How can we bring back the idea of perseverance?

Two hundred years ago people were dying from all sorts of diseases, mainly infectious, such as cholera, diphtheria, and Typhoid fever. Their long-suffering was watching people die all around them, persevering being left alone to manage on their own. Life expectancy was between 30 and 40  yrs of age while now we are celebrating 100 year birthdays at at amazing rate. We may have increased life expectancy with our modern medicine but it comes at a cost of more people now needing to learn to live with chronic conditions. Our ability to fight infection with antibiotics has made the biggest difference. Now we need to work on walking alongside people as they,  you and me live with the "benefits" of surviving and persevering with the fatigue, pain and heartaches that surviving gives us.