What would you say to cancer if you could? Share your thoughts and stories with us to celebrate Victoria Derbyshire's memoir Dear Cancer, Love Victoria - a copy of the book plus a £100 House of Fraser voucher to be won

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. BHF seem to be using “fighting” talk about heart disease now. There was a celeb who had heart disease and wrote a recipe book, and I saw a Pippa Middleton book in the BHF the other day

Do you have heart disease yourself? my dad does/did

We had a few years didn't we after WW2 ? When they introduced the NHS, and then cancer seemed to spiral

Maybe it was always there and people just died of other things first ?

Maybe the industrial advances and increase in chemicals aggravated it...

That said my children asked me what my super power would be and my immediate answer was to cure cancer for children . So I am a bit soppy

stop oddly I was thinking a similar thing earlier today. The “bad old days” weren’t even that long ago. In just a few generations we’ve developed the expectation of living a long, healthy ish life. Now disease and death are a huge shock to us. We feel entitled to good health and a long life. (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.)

As you say, cancer is now a fact of life. It’s unlikely anyone will be unaffected by it at all. Demonising it and fearing it won’t help. It’s not an outside evil that we can fight off. It’s just our own cells going a bit haywire.

WhatwouldLesley - yes, I know what disease Victoria Derbyshire had. I'm wondering why there are no celebrity memoirs written about "battling" or "fighting" heart disease. Cancer is made out to be such a monster but cardiovascular disease is a bigger killer.

The title of this thread is daft. What would I say to cancer? Erm ... nothing because it can't hear or understand!

I don't know how to answer this actuallly

In the Bad old days people died in wars , childbirth and tooth infection (to make a few)

Now we have managed these risks and instead we have this disease as the biggest killer

Had I been a few hundred years ago I would lose people to different things

I support a cancer charity and I pray that when my turn comes (1 in 3) that I can be cured

I think that demonising it and making it evil helps no one . It's a horrible illness but it's a fixed part of our lives now and the focus should be on providing the best support and education to the many people afflicted

I hope that doesn't sound callous / I just don't think demonising a disease helps

I don't see why I can't voice my opinion. My Dad died very recently and I watched him die. It wasn't nice but it could've been worse. He could have driven to work one day after an argument and never come home. I feel I am able to comment on the issue after have a close family member live with cancer and die from it.
No one has to agree with me. We are all entitled to speak our minds, it's not insensitive as I am grieving, I have had close experience with cancer. Not just my Dad. This is a thread full of people living with cancer or have lost someone yes. But I am one of those people too.

Right Cathy, but it’s still not the disease that the writer had.

guest I see where you’re coming from, but it really wasn’t an appropriate thing to say on a thread filled with people who have cancer or have a loved one who does.

I’m sorry about your dad, and I’m glad you feel he had a good death. Unfortunately many people are not comfortable when they are dying from cancer, and many people experience disturbing hallucinations and similar from morphine. In some ways perhaps it is a good way to die, but then again there is really no good way for a parent of young children to die, or indeed for a child to die.

I don’t know if you saw it at the time, but a few years back there was quite a controversial BMJ blog published by Richard Smith entitled Dying of cancer is the best death. There were various responses to it, including one on the Cancer Research UK blog.

It’s such an emotive subject with strong feelings on both side. When the article I mentioned was published, there were heated arguments about it in several online cancer groups that I’m in.

It’s something I ponder occasionally, and I feel entitled to an opinion on it as I have stage IV bowel cancer so unless treatments improve, I will be lucky to reach my 30th birthday.

I am grateful in some ways that I will get the chance to say goodbye. But the flip side is that I’m living in a strange limbo where I am not actually dying right now, but I know I will sooner rather than later. I can’t make long term plans. I also know that my family will have to watch as I slowly fade away, potentially in pain and distress. My cancer is in my lungs so I fear I will slowly suffocate. Who knows. In some ways I think perhaps it would be better to just drop dead one day with no warning, having been living my life normally up until that point.

I suppose it’s a pointless discussion really as it’s not something we have much control over!

Absolutely it's been a privilege to struggle on a daily basis for the last year while my DH has been treated for cancer ........... NOT

I am so tired, trying to keep everyone together and normal

guest2013 - what a spectacularly insensentive post. You may change your mind when you have witnessed other cancer deaths.

guest
Your post is the most stupid, offensive and ignorant that I have read on here. "A privileged way to die" Really? What utter, total, complete crap. I'm not even going to dignify your stupidity with a longer response.

In our house it's just 'cancer's just shit isn't it?'

WhatwouldLesleyDo - cardiovascular disease is the number 1 cause of death globally.

There's no monster to battle..n cancer isn't a fiend.... it is a illness, a disease, there was no 'battle' for my dad... he had an aggressive cancer that was stopping his body from functioning. He didn't 'lose a fight' as there was no fight.

We should be dealing with a disease that needs investigation to find cures,not some morbid romanticising of people being stolen away by the wicked fiend of cancer.

Sorry, hopenot too stupid sounding

Aye, I hate the words used around cancer.

My lovely fil passed and it used to upset me when people would say 'he'll beat it, he's a fighter...' long after we were told not to make any long term plans. It was almost as though him dying of cancer was due to a failing on his part.

It's a godawful disease and seeing it take everything my previously beer-drinking, pipe smoking, always laughing and joking, fiercely proud and marvellously optimistic father in law was, and what it's taken from the family broke my heart.

reallyanotherone totally nails it.
Cancer is a shit disease, some people are unfortunate enough to get it. There are some effective treatments, which can be pretty shit to go through too. We need more research to develop more effective treatments with less heinous side effects. We also shouldn't make ill people feel worse for not "fighting hard enough" and enough with all the pink crap too,
Rant over.

Are you in the UK? According to these stats from the BHF website, heart disease doesn’t kill more people than cancer here (see Table 1.1). They’re both major killers though and it would be good if both could be prevented or treated more effectively. Cancer does seem to be the “celebrity” of diseases, which must be frustrating for those with other diseases, especially the less common ones which don’t get much research funding at all.

But the author had breast cancer...

What about Dear Heart Disease - it kills far more people than cancer?

Instead of talking to the cancer, could we talk to decision makers about trials, money for research, prevention, ....
As if cancer would listen. Not that I believe for a minute that politicians would listen either ....

I would say that I think anthropomorphising it is a weird and infantilising trend, and that's with three parental cancers under my belt.

It is an awful illness, indiscriminate.
Dear Cancer, fuck off.
Not very eloquent but I feel it makes my point.
If I do win, I will donate to a local cancer charity.

I also agree with really, and while I have no wish to denigrate the good work being done by Victoria Derbyshire, it is almost unique as a disease insofar as it is implied that to recover from it ("beat" it) you need a certain strength and state of mind ("fight" it.)

I can understand how such terminology comes about. I am 35. I know that if I had been born twenty years earlier, I would have grown up with 'cancer' being almost akin to 'corpse.' As it is, thanks to research, prevention and treatment, it isn't. But when cancer is either certainly terminal, or where it isn't but the chemotherapy is such that the individual is left wanting to die due to feeling so wretched, the idea of fighting back against something can be helpful, I suppose. And perhaps it helps in the grieving process to take vengeance on cancer in some way by fighting it, I don't know.

The difficulty with this terminology is of course that the inference is survivors fought it, while those who died might have gone down nobly but they still "lost", and it is easy to say why that is a problem.

Twitter, my thoughts are with you. There are as many cancers as there are body parts. Breast cancer seems to be one of the more common. My mother had stomach cancer which I think was easy to miss, but this was twenty years ago.

I agree wholeheartedly with the comments reallyanotherone made earlier.

I detest with a passion the language applied to it in terms of struggles, journeys or battles. Cancer is no respecter of persons be they good or bad. It does not discriminate.

Dear cancer,

There are so many evil people out there, why do you seek out the good?