“Let’s remember that cancer is a chronic disease,” the mother dear said to a client yesterday.
The mother dear is a veterinarian who specializes in acupuncture, chiropractic, and physiotherapy. Many of her patients are ones who need extra help because Western medicine can’t do much for them. Because of this, a lot of the patients are elderly and very sick.
Animals pick up on human emotion and it can have more of an impact on their health than you might think. Just as it can help our mental stability and relationships if we keep a positive attitude, so can it rub off on our animals when they aren’t feeling 100%.
Yesterday, one of our regular clients was in for an appointment and she was quite teary because her beloved dog (a really sweet creature) has been diagnosed with cancer. The mother dear reminded her that she wouldn’t feel as though everything is lost if her dog had diabetes or epilepsy: the client would simply adjust her pet’s lifestyle to accommodate for the chronic disease and deal with it.
“It’s about the quality of life,” the mother dear reminded this particular client. To paraphrase, she pointed out that “Jake* is really happy right now, and he’s still up and wanting to go for walks and he’s still eating. He’ll tell us when he’s suffering. But until then, enjoy your time with him. Think of the cancer as any other chronic disease – it’s not the end of the world.”
I repeat this anecdote because I think that it’s something we can take with us – to remember that when it comes to the rhetoric of how we live our lives and how we interact with others, the attitudes that we take can make a significant difference.
In all areas of life.
*Name has been changed to protect client confidentiality.
It’s amazing what an emotional punch the word ‘cancer’ still packs, isn’t it? It has a kind of death knell doom to it and undertones of pain that to a large extent are no longer valid. And although I doubt veterinary medicine has made the advances here that human medicine has, there must have been improvements, and of course animals do not have to endure as much as people do at the end. Where I work, at the Institute of Cancer Research, our mission is “To remove the fear of cancer as a life-threatening disease”, and I love how precise this is. We’re not aiming to cure cancer, but we’re aiming to make it exactly as your mother said, a chronic disease that people can live with, not a killer. In 2009 we celebrated our centenary, and our slogan for that was “Making our first centenary our last.” again, to me that is very powerful, because it’s saying that within a hundred years – and in fact, probably in only 30 or 40 – we will be at cancer, schmancer, not even as bad as diabetes, just another disease, and all the top research talent will have moved on. But It would be fascinating to know whether by then ‘cancer’ will have lost it’s emotional resonance, and the fuss people make about it in literature seem as archaic as the fuss Jane Austin’s characters get into when someone catches a cold, or whether it will retain this sinister, hushed-voice sense of dread, a bit like the word ‘plague’ still does.
Awesome blog. I just wanted to say thanks for your work!