Do Not Dwell on Cancer
Cancer is so frightening to have, and so is watching and treating it.
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Whether it is the doctor treating cancer, the patient who has cancer, or the patient's family members—once they dwell on cancer, it is as if they have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Cancer will devour, consume, and destroy everything we have. Ideals, passion, and the capacity for joy will be destroyed by cancer until nothing remains.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a novel, Cancer Ward. The protagonist, Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, at the age of forty-five, is diagnosed with a malignant tumor. He is immediately dispatched to a hospital in the cold north and put in a hospital gown. From then on he finds himself as if in a cancer labor camp: no freedom, no end.
In fact, this feeling is not unique to cancer patients; doctors who treat cancer feel it too. Caring for cancer patients is not an easy job. A doctor must have a life outside medicine, or sooner or later he will break down. I have also been encouraging every patient I treat to return to society as soon as possible, because if they are cut off from society for too long and keep dwelling on cancer, their survival time and quality of life will decline sharply.
Cancer patients receiving treatment in hospital are like entering a prison; leaving the hospital requires asking the doctor for leave. If they leave the ward on their own without the attending physician's approval, the nurses' station will keep urging them to return.
And treating cancer is not easy; many patients, family members, and doctors suffer repeated setbacks. Hope is kindled again and again, only to be disappointed again and again. No matter how strong the patient, the family, or the doctor, there comes a time when they are broken.
Modern people have become more fragile in the face of death than the ancients, largely because we have handed the hospice care of our loved ones over to hospitals, leaving us without death education.
In a sense, using medical technology to prolong death is an expensive punishment that violates humanitarianism. I have seen too many terminal patients, or their families, desperately begging doctors to try harder to create miracles that simply cannot be created. At that point, treatment is purely a spiritual comfort combined with physical torment.
Doctors do not feel good facing this situation either. Treatment failure always leaves me with a sense of guilt toward the patient and the family. Sometimes, to reduce this guilt, I politely decline some patients who seek my care. But in truth such polite refusals cannot stop patients and their families from continuing to struggle on this hopeless road; over time, my mind accumulates a great deal of negative emotion.
Recently I have finally had a few days of serious rest, away from the work environment. Although I cannot truly be at peace—because there are always patients consulting about their conditions—even so, I have relaxed well. Since yesterday I have returned to my normal work state; although the workload is still heavy, my mood is much lighter.
A 24/7 on-call state is truly a great assault on the body and mind. I think from now on I will take such breaks often, and I hope patients and their families will also give themselves a break. Step out of the whirlpool of cancer once in a while, let life have other content, and do not dwell on cancer.