Calling out the Big C

Cancer – there, I said it. According to the most recent research reported in the British Journal of Cancer, over half of us under the age of sixty-five will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lifetime. If you manage to dodge this bullet there is a significant chance that you will know someone who has cancer, and that some may die from the disease. I meet both the former and latter criteria, witnessing both my wife and mother-in-law succumb to this bastard of an illness. Yet, even in the face of these daunting statistics, there are reasons to be cheerful since cancer survival rates in the UK have doubled over the last four decades, and around half of diagnosed patients survive for more than ten years.

- Ian Kirke

So why do I still struggle to actually say the word without a convenient slang term to fall back on, as emphasized by the choice of title for this piece? If I am honest it still scares me, and I have found it one of the most difficult subjects to talk about. For me it even eclipses death. I guess that many of you reading this will also struggle to comprehend what a sufferer will feel like unless you have trodden the same path. Having said that, both of my personal experiences of cancer were different, and it wasn’t until I was in the eye of the storm that I realized there are in excess of two-hundred types.

Because of the colossal emotion and daunting statistics, I had decided to file away this enormous disorientation, preferring the convenient comfort of the mantra, “It may never personally touch me.” But who am I kidding? A coin toss away is hardly a satisfactory statistic. And if I was lucky, what about those people, including my friends, who weren’t? Didn’t I at least need to better support them, rather than hiding behind a pathetic synonym? Nonetheless, there were many reasons to procrastinate. Until I met Tina.