Fungible Convictions

Nothing has had Lindsay and me reevaluate my experience with cancer quite like the conference we attended yesterday. While the morning session, Couples and Cancer, reinforced everything we thought we knew—what chemo was like, how cancer can bring couples together, even couples that have been couples for only a month before diagnosis—the afternoon session, Intimacy After Cancer, was right out disturbing. This wasn’t because of the content, as the moderator was an outstanding counselor from Dana Farber, but because Lindsay and I had thought we had it rough. We moved through the process of mourning our old lives pretty quickly, in part because we knew our new normal would be a life influenced by but not defined by cancer. But the people in the afternoon session put our experience in such a radically different perspective, given that they couldn’t get away from cancer no matter how hard they tried. We went in thinking “Intimacy After Cancer” would be another session for couples, but it turned out we were the only couple there. The others were mostly young singles who’d had mastectomies, ovaries removed, or who hadn’t dated because they had no idea how to introduce the fact that they’d had stage 4 cancer or a kind that would never fully go away.

Then there was the competitiveness—akin to parents of high school seniors bragging about where their kids had been accepted. “I had Hodgkin’s.” “Well, I had a brain tumor.” “Well, I was given a week to live, fell in love with another patient, somehow got better, and then the guy I fell in love with died.” And the competitiveness—it shut me up. I can’t begrudge the other attendees their need to tell their stories, even if they need to top each other. But I’d been so caught up in my version of cancer and the cancer stories you see on TV (i.e., stories of conquering cancer or killed by it), that it had never occurred to me that some young people develop cancer, get treated but not cured, and live with outwardly different bodies with no easy way to explain to someone they like what has happened. It scared Lindsay a bit more, for the opposite reason, because she’d seen me at my worst, when my neurologist had to sit her and my family down and tell them I may never live again without constant assistance.

But then there was the show-stopper of the session: a guy I won’t name who looked for every chance to talk about the lesions he’d had removed from his penis, a kind of skin cancer-plus-STD caused by having sex with a woman with the human papilloma virus. He literally asked all of the women in the room if they had cervical cancer or tested positive for HPV and if so, had they told their sexual partners they had HPV and if would they apologize. He wanted strangers to apologize for another woman’s cancer, which he had in essence “caught”. His backstory was a sad, complicated, and lonely one, but I doubt if even the moderator had ever seen a man blame a woman, in proxy, for his cancer.