I am a 35-year survivor (my choice of language) of childhood acute myeloid leukaemia and, not coincidentally, now a paediatric oncologist. I’ve never particularly liked metaphors of war and fighting in the context of cancer discussions, but I hear relatively commonly from parents or relatives that a child is “a fighter” or is “incredibly brave”. From my own experiences as a patient (four cycles of intensive chemotherapy interleaved with five episodes of near-fatal sepsis), and as a clinician (I look after children awaiting bone marrow transplants, undergoing high-dose chemotherapy, who have had amputations or other major surgery, or who have spent years taking chemotherapy), I can fully understand why people do reach for this language.
It’s good to be reminded that, like Simon Jenkins (Let King Charles’s illness finally change how we speak about cancer: it’s not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a ‘war’, 16 February) and your correspondents (Letters, 22 February), many people’s experience of cancer is of a single mass found early and fully resected before it metastasises, or of a once-fatal condition converted to a chronic illness by modern medication. Of course, we should be careful about how we speak of cancer. But please, let people choose their own words. And if your own experience of cancer has been relatively fortunate, don’t police too heavy-handedly the language of those who do feel themselves to be in a life-or-death struggle.
Regarding Richard Nixon, Mr Jenkins may be interested to know that the war on cancer speech was made in support of the 1971 National Cancer Act. In 1969, the US spent less than 90 cents per person on cancer research, and talk of cancer was taboo in polite society, in the way that Mr Jenkins rightly decries. Nixon was persuaded by experts that a properly funded national effort was required to improve cancer treatment, and could be his administration’s Apollo programme. His language was understood by a nation for whom the second world war was a recent memory, and the cold war a present reality, and he got his funding. It’s impossible to say what cancer treatment would look like today if that hadn’t happened when it did. A delay of even a few years would likely have been fatal to my chances in the late 1980s.
Dr Chris Howell
Liverpool
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