Dear friends and readers,
I regret to report that the cancer epidemic has reached Jenny Diski. In a determinedly comic column Diski announced she had been diagnosed as having a form of inoperable cancer which features cancer traveling into your lypmph nodes and (“very bad” she writes) into the esophagus. Statistically she is told she has 2-3 years before she dies: in the case of cancer you ignore statistics at your peril: I ignored the 40% of all people diagnosed with esophageal cancer dead within a year, and we went ahead with a horribly mutilating operation (if in doubt remove it) for him, which when the cancer metastasized only made him die quicker and suffer much more. I hoped he’d be in the 60%.
She writes:
One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality. But I sense that I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them.
Jim too thought this kind of language ridiculous but eventually was driven to say the physicians had intended to battle the cancer in his body. All they did was ruin his body.
She jokes:
So – we’d better get cooking the meth,’ I said to the Poet, sitting to one side and slightly behind me. The Poet with an effort got his face to work and responded properly. ‘This time we quit while the going’s good.’ The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didn’t watch much US TV drama.
I hope she does keep a cancer diary in public; from my reading of so many of her essays (whenever I come across one, I read it, pronta), she will be perceptive and wise. Her book might tell of the hurt, the pain and lies, will be another voice calling attention to the crying need for fundamental research.
People in the world writing, reportage, and in colleges need to know that this epidemic is killing out of all proportion old, middle-aged and now young, rare cancers no longer rare.
Just now I’m reading Diski’s Skating to Antartica, which is lending me courage to go on the trips I’ve planned this fall. I realize I should read her Stranger on a Train. As a regular essayist she’s in a league with Hilary Mantel, Lorna Sage, Margaret Atwood, Diane Johnson, Anita Brookner; among men, Richard Holmes, Richard Davenport-Hines.
Poor woman. Cooking did distract Walter White and that “lost waif,” Jesse Pinkman.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Only this morning I heard a woman in the bank talking about her mother “fighting cancer” and her being a fighter. Her mother has breast cancer and it has spread to her lymph nodes-not good. I think it makes the victim of cancer out to be somehow to blame if they die, as if they didn’t fight hard enough. Also who wants their body to be a battleground. It’s all rubbish. Governments do not fund research, providing only a fraction of the amount cancer charities provide. Likewise with heart disease research, governments underfund research. What are they afraid of? Do they fear that their policies on the environment and food are to blame?
Oh I agree about this metaphor. And it also coerces people into appearing to be “cheerful fighters.” So no one will complain. Everyone should protest. Instead the strategy of saying how very complicated cancers are and there is no underlying mechanism is continually repeated and successful as people don’t identify with others enough. Each person hopes he or she will escape – -and after appearing compassionate you hear pretty quickly the quiet: did he or she go to the doctor regularly? did he or she ever smoke? drink ….
I’ve read the British parliament (gov’t) is all for fracking. That’s a process which turns the world around it into poison — water sets on fire. They know their policies are to blame.
Yes they are and the cracking areas are often areas of outstanding natural beauty, a legal term denoting a measure of protection , until a oil company comes along. Altho’ you own the land your house sits on, the mineral rights below it are the governments hence, they can destroy your house to get oil.