Cancer Victims

Self-pity is the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics. It is addictive,

gives momentary pleasure, and separates the
victim from reality.
- John Gardner
Victimology is the study of the relationship between someone who
has been injured and the perpetrator or inflicter of the injury. The field1
seeks to understand the nature of the harm, its consequential effects and
the exact nature of the relationship of the parties, the victim and the
offender. What was the reason for the harm? Why? When? Where?
What are the short term and long term outcomes, physically, but mostly
psychologically, though the two are inextricably related?
Victimization usually entails some criminal act through which an
individual harms another person. You shoot me; I hit you over the head
with a hammer; I kidnap your child; you steal my lawnmower; you are
drunk and run over my prize-winning beagle; I steal your checkbook and
pay my country club bill with your money. A naked Erin Andrews is
covertly filmed. Or what about a street gang beating you up or a Russian
mob stealing your credit card number by hacking Target's computers, there
may be multiple perpetrators and multiple victims?
These kinds of injuries to pocketbooks, bodies and reputations
are both criminal and prosaic events and even when there are multiple
parties on one or both sides of the harm equation class action, anyone there's both an offender and someone who has been victimized, harmed
either physically, financially, psychologically, or otherwise.
Being a victim of cancer does not lend itself it to such easy
analysis. But cancer victim is a term so commonly used that it's covered
1 Yeah, it's a recognized academic endeavor.

with moss and mildew. Cancer victim is at least platitudinous, if not

outright cornball. But the term nevertheless demands a close look. With
cancer, it's easy to locate the victim, one-half of the equation. It's a lot
more difficult to put one's finger on the perpetrator. Breast cancer, colon
cancer, multiple myeloma . . . where's the street gang? Incurable brain
cancer . . . where is the wife beater? Bone cancer . . . where is the car
thief?
Part of the problem is that cancer always is more personal and
personalized than other diseases. When one suffers a disabling stroke, the
miscreant blood clot is not much vilified. When one suffers an occluded
coronary artery, we don't rail against the evil plaque monster. Only cancer
sets up the offender-victim relationship so rationally, so comprehensibly.
Sure, I struggle with, but actually like, using the term cancer
victim. It's dynamic and persuasive. And it's convenient . . . like David
and Goliath; Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty; Sylvester and Tweety Bird;
or Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. But with pain, misery, death and
disability attached. Okay, professional football certainly has all that, but in
the end no one gets hurt in a Sylvester versus small and sweet yellow bird
conflict.
For all its curious abstraction and fugitive nature, cancer, the
disease and the word, is nevertheless definable. It's easily construed as the
enemy, with the patient - or survivor as its victim. But that itself sets up
another problem . . . and not just a semantic one, either. After all, words
are just symbols for ideas, objects and qualities, whether tangible or
intangible. The word cloud isn't a cloud and the word cancer isn't
cancer. And, persons with cancer (see how easy it is to say that!), once
they start thinking of themselves as a victims, well they become victims,
they are a victims. And the use of that word, victim, disables both
psychologically and physically. If you refer to yourself as a victim, you
have you have devalued yourself. Victim implies passivity, frailty and
infirmity. I am weak, I am subjugated, I am powerless.
It's better to put off the use off the word victim until you are
dead. Then you can let others decide on word choice. Then you'll have a
lifetime, so to speak, to to engage in bantering about with the angels the

philosophy of words.
- Six hundred thousand people die
annually from cancer.

There are 1.7 million new cancer

cases each year in the United States.

Heart disease is the largest killer

of Americans.

In about three years, cancer will

pass heart disease as the leading cause
of death in the United States.
- The American Cancer Society
A survivor is one who lives through an affliction or one who
outlives another, the latter definition surely setting up a rather
uncomfortable competition between you and the rest of the world . . . a
sort of winners and losers proposition.
And what's the most commonly used antonym of survivor?
Incredibly enough, it's victim. And the synonyms for victim are mostly
just weird, e.g. dier and perisher and casualty. However, casualty,
while a more than a tad militaristic, is better than dier, for sure.
As for me, I hereby regretfully admit to liking the word victim, if
not for others, certainly, at least, for me personally. I want desperately for
others to feel sorry for me. I am dying a slow painful death from throat
cancer. I can barely type this with my peripheral neuropathy-afflicted
finger tips. I have cancer. With my pain comes my pride in my pain. I am
powerless, but prideful. I demand cards and presents and flowers. I
demand to be thought highly of. I insist that people whisper within
earshot that I have been unfairly singled out for abject pain and years of
misery through no fault of my own.
Of course, I want the blame for my disease to be anyone's but mine.
I want the brutality of its onslaught and the misery of its treatment - and

what they refer to as recovery - to be known by all and appreciated.

Woe is me. I'm not just a cancer patient or a cancer sufferer, goddammit,
I'm a cancer victim.
You take life into your own hands, and
see what happens? A terrible thing.
There is no one to blame.
- Erica Jong
If you are particularly dense, you may not realize that at this very
moment, with or without cancer, you too are a victim. For Pete's sake, get
on board. Here you are, going through life as some insouciant babe-in-thewoods, unaware of your very own victimhood. Own it. Global warming;
big banks; massive corporate conspiracies; and Flint-like water. Asbestos.
Airbags. I am not nearly as wealthy as my friends, though I have worked
harder than them my entire life. I got passed over again for a
promotion . . . one that was given to a left-handed, African-American
Jewish nun with one leg. Why is it that I have to keep on competing with
the swarthy and disabled?
Now, if you haven't got a good I'm a victim attitude now . . . if
you do not think yourself as a victim . . . don't rush out and start chain
smoking just to get lung cancer and have your friends huddle around to
watch you struggle for breath. Your friends will know that your cancer is
self-inflicted, and self-inflicted injuries and ailments are decidedly nonvictimy.
We should never underestimate the sense
of relief that comes from shifting the
responsibility for our misery on to
someone or something else.
- Professor Manfred Kets deVries
victimhood has an even more vile aspect. An individual whom I
adore and respect is fellow Memphian Rachel Shankman, the daughter of
Holocaust survivors, born in a displaced persons camp in Munich,

Germany. Once, I asked Rachel about the relative tragedies of the Jewish
Holocaust (Shoah) with its six million plus dead, versus the Armenian
genocide (one million); the Khmer Gouge's Cambodia killings (2.2
million); Russia's Holodomor (three million); and the possibly fifty million
killed under Mao's dreadful regime. Rachel offer a slight smile of
understanding and said, We don't get into comparative victimology.
That's a fruitless and dangerous exercise. Our goal is to help people
understand the nature of man and his actions and how these types of things
can even happen in the first place. Every avoidable death is important.
The death of every one of these people in genocides led and perpetrated
by terrible men and women each person who died is equally tragic,
equally important.
My mother, Cesia Fromer and my father, Abe
Fromer, both survivors of the Holocaust,
studied the American Constitution as one
would study the Bible. One of the proudest days
of their lives and mine (I was 10) was the day
we became naturalized citizens. We are so
grateful for this country and the promise of a
more perfect union for all people.
Rachel Shankman
The statistics the epidemiology of cancer goes a long way
toward clearing up the right to claim victimhood. Five to ten percent of
cancers inherited. Undeniably, that gives one the right to blame one's
father, mother, grandparents and so forth, perhaps even back to Adam and
Eve. If only God that rat had not created Adam and Even . . . and if
they'd not had Cain, Abel and some daughters to go along, I'd be robust,
hard, and disease-free.
The American Cancer Society reports that one-third of Americans
will develop cancer in their lifetimes, though I'm unsure at what other time
one might get cancer. The United Kingdom says that forty-two percent of
cancers are caused by lifestyle factors and thus preventable. CNN
reported recently that fifty percent of cancers were preventable. And the

Centers for Disease Control writes that one-third of cancers are

preventable, excluding tobacco and smoking related cancers, all of which
are preventable. Including tobacco related cancers in the total raises the
aggregate number of avoidable and preventable cancers to somewhere
between sixty and seventy percent.
Philosopher Richard Taylor thought that among the presuppositions
of most philosophers was that, wrongly, determinism is true and that man
has a natural inclination to believe in it. I'm not so sure that being a fatalist
is such a horrible thing. If, like so many early philosophers, one believes
that every notion, act and event is the result of some foregoing notion, act
or event, then pretty quickly one's knickers get severely wadded up. Well,
maybe fatalism or the essentially fruitless search for the basic or real
cause of any event might still be better than reverting to blame.

What I've found, fortunately, is that most cancer victims are not
blamers, they're not weak. Many are so sick that they don't have the energy
for negative thoughts. And long-term survivors somehow learn to put
blame and responsibility on a shelf in a back room. They move on. And
there a quite a few que sera, sera. I guess that Que sera, sera is a sort
of determinism light.
Whatever degree of acceptance and resolution cancer victims feel,
there are nevertheless some who grovel in a sort of why me? mire. Well,
maybe God got up one morning - if indeed He sleeps - and thought, Why
you? Because today happens to be your day. That's why. Okay, okay, it's
fatalistic. But if you don't think God has a sense of humor, youre surely
not ready for a serious bout of cancer.
So, if you did not pick your parents well, you smoked, you drank a
lot of alcohol, you were overweight, you did not eat lots of fresh fruits and
vegetables, you lingered in the the sun . . . and you got cancer . . . well, join
the club populated by a majority of cancer victims, nearly all, in fact. And
you get to say that you are a victim. Just like Ahab was a victim of the big

white fish that kept chasing him.

So don't use the V-word much. Or ever.
I am a victim of introspection.
- Sylvia Plath