Thirty years ago, I read a very nice study that followed how people perceive the names of two diseases that, after their onset, killed people almost equally. Using an interesting method (a very nice tool: Osgood's semantic differential), researchers compared the words "infarct" and "cancer." I am speaking of a time already distant for some contemporaries, and I recall that the first peak in mortality was the same: after five years for both diseases.
While "infarct," apparently thanks to the early successes of invasive cardiological methods, was evaluated very benevolently at the time, the concept of "cancer" was burdened with horror, dread, and disgust. Today, far more people die from diseases of the circulatory system than from neoplasms, and the word cancer has been stripped of its irrational aura and has become a common term. Above all, thanks also to (here the prefix is warranted) numerous autobiographical publications about personal experiences, which removed the taboo from this area.
As the author of one such book that I helped bring into the world (the book, that is) told me, cancer "as if uncorked her" and her creative activity resembles an active volcano. Those of us who have gone through the experience with this beast realize—each in our own way—that we are on this earth "on probation," and we can appreciate it all the more. After 32 radiation sessions (on the 33rd, the rays bent, so they forgave me), I gave myself the title His Illuminatedness (blessed by Dana Drábová) and assigned myself the rank of trisbishop (that's between a bishop and a tetrarch). People turn to me and don't know that as a psychiatrist I am completely uneducated in this area, like most of my colleagues, but as an experienced onco-layman I can do something for them.
A lady wrote to me who, some time ago, was affected not only physically but also psychologically by a cancer diagnosis, and so besides oncologists, she also ended up seeing me. We last saw each other before Christmas last year, when she was doing quite well. Her yesterday's letter begins: Warm greetings, and I have a wish: may I write out my fears and anxieties to you...
Her attending physician is apparently a skilled oncologist and apparently a complete communication idiot. When they both praised how excellent the results and health condition were, and the patient expressed hope that things would continue this way, he dampened her spirits by assuring her not to count on it. When she asked whether the insurance company would continue to cover the treatment, or whether her body would hold up, he explained that the tumor "would get used to it" and everything would go to hell.
That is not objective information, that is outrageous! Dear colleague, if you had done this to me, my reaction would have been different. Medicine is not so magnificent that it can prophesy about one specific individual. It has statistical results, but those are not capable of predicting the fate of the patient who is currently in the office. Moreover, inducing such negative emotions (and an average intelligent person must reckon with that—an idiot doesn't have to!) certainly does not belong in the program of good medical practice.
As the trisbishop of the non-church of all of us who have survived, are surviving, and will survive cancer, I want to say: don't let anyone take away your hope! Emotions are damn physical processes that affect our immunity. Seek joy, seek meaning! These are factors that strengthen life. And report these graduates of the Prognostic Institute, which produced a fine mess, to the Czech Medical Chamber for harming health!
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist