Stigma, pity, fear, nausea..

The woman said she did not want to eat. She also said that she did not want to drink water. I said, the place hot, aren't you scared of dehydration? She said that she cannot eat or drink. I am rude and kept asking. She said that one of the side effects of the chemo is nausea and dizziness.  She also has to eat in private in case she feels she has to vomit. She then said, she was not sure of people knowing that she is a cancer survivor. She was a private person and she could not stand pity, it is one of the things she said that family members have to understand. The dizziness has made her stop driving.

She spoke to the rest of the group after and we learnt how many people had to nurse others through Cancer.

The news came today that PM Thompson of Barbados died after his own battle with pancreatic cancer. Cancer has no age. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture also brought this form of cancer to public awareness. This October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and I am thinking of a young doctor friend who has recently found a lesion in her breast which might be malignant.. worst case is that a mastectomy would help.  She is younger than me. We had heard of another girl who had to remove her breast when in her twenties.

I had a great aunt who had a mastectomy but she never told any of her relatives because of the shame she felt about it. They found out from her husband when she died. Two aunts, one on my mother's side and another on my mother's side died of blood related cancers.  An amazing woman I know in the Bahamas tells me in the email, that she and her husband are both well "given their diagnosis of cancer".. she in Remission, her husband with another diagnosis and having to be careful with excess radiation therapy.
Audre Lorde's essay about transforming silence into action was written after her own cancer diagnosis.

In a conversation with another group, we discussed testing. The women talked about the VIA test. Some had done it, others were scared to do it. One of the young men in the group (proudly wearing his two silver earrings) said he not going for prostate check "as long as they doing that same method.." We were puzzled and then realised he did not want to have a rectal examination.. so people asked him if he would rather suffer and he said  yes..  .. Linden Lewis referred to this in Trinidad how homophobia has its consequences. A few men are not sure what their prostate is.

Early detection is good they say, but the treatment is not easily available for all forms of cancer. A group of women talked about the importance of moral support - and Periwinkle Club has been doing that, offering the support group and individual support to patients at whatever stage they are at of their diagnosis. Dr Janice Imhoff's book of stories from women who had cancer is available at Austins Book Shop.

But the men though.. this thing called Cancer which they do not talk about. David Thompson (after many months), Randy Pausch, Lance Armstrong we know about.. but the men who are taught to be stoic, who would lament the West Indies team publicly .. what about their own breast cancer, and colon cancer, and prostate cancer, and facing their own immortality and how are the men around us surviving.. if men get cancer, are they supposed to shut up, take it like a man, dont cry, do the treatment, fight their own bodies.. not want to talk to anybody about how that feels?

And in our health discussions in Guyana,  can we learn from the money spent on HIV AIDS that now we have it at a stage that many of us do not know people who are HIV positive or have died from HIV - that we also get the same focus on cancer and perhaps we could also get to a point where we can reduce the occurrence of cancer?