Some metaphors that matter – Are we rare? Are we warriors?

by Natalia Fernández

"Saying sarcoma, Telling sarcoma" by Natalia Fernández

Several years ago - long before sarcoma entered my life and shortly after I lost my brother to leukaemia - I remember reading a Spanish broadsheet newspaper which, at the top of a colourful feature, had a headline that read: "Great interview with the heroes who won the battle against cancer". I felt a bitter pang in the pit of my stomach. It seemed to me that language was put at the service of injustice, itself the result of an overt bias: it implied that those who die are the losers because they did not struggle enough. But in cancer, there are no winners or losers: only people whose lives have changed the rules of the game and who have to press the accelerator of survival. It is clear, that those who survive cancer do not do so because of their willingness, nor by magic concoctions, nor by the strength of their faith.

So how did we come to turn cancer into a moral category? To understand this better, we must bear in mind the role that metaphors have played in medical (and scientific) narratives in general.

The first time the language of disease was militarised was in the second half of the 19th century, when syphilis was combated with what was called the "magic bullet". Obviously, a kind bullet is only unleashed by an equally kind hand - the health professionals - and unleashes an all-out fight on a peculiar battlefield: the sick body. It was only a matter of time before the patient (especially the patient of a fatal disease like cancer) was required to be, in addition, a good soldier.

The militarisation of scientific language permeated society, so that we still frequently hear from the patient's side "I am fighting", "I will win this war/battle", "let's support our warrior". This is complemented by treating cancer as an enemy to be humiliated. #Fuckyoucancer has become a widespread hashtag of our time.

However, let's be clear: Cancer has no winners (those who survive) or losers (those who don't). Nor is it a rational entity sensitive to our beliefs or our determination to submit ourselves to what the lucid American essayist Barbara Ehrenreich - a cancer patient herself - called "the dictatorship of the positive thought"[i]. Nor is cancer a long illness, as some obituaries euphemistically put it.

We must acknowledge that we turn to those myths and metaphors because literalness is sometimes terrifying. And because, within the comfort zone of language, we can save (or condemn) ourselves.

Sarcoma patients share these kind of metaphors with patients of other types of cancer. But we do have some distinctive features. For example, by suffering from a ‘rare cancer’, we ourselves become rare - and we vindicate this through a transfer of meanings. But it is one thing for us as patients to use bias and metaphor to create a message that leaves no one indifferent, and quite another for many healthcare professionals to refer to sarcoma patients in this way: ‘Here comes the sarcoma’ or: ‘This girl is the sarcoma I mentioned’.

We are more than our tumors, more than soldiers, more than warriors, more than victors and vanquished: we are human. And, as such, we have ahead the task of humanizing language.   Call us by our names, don’t forget our background.  We are not cases or stories, but just people.

[i] Ehrenreich, B. (2010): Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Picador Pan Macmillan

Credits:  Graphics by Natalia Fernández provided to SPAGN for publication @nataliafernandezdiazcabal; photo provided by Natalia Fernández.