"Cancer: the good, the bad, and the ugly" (Article)

Maybe just a little harsh for this forum but here goes:

When I am feeling down and someone tells me to "suck it up"
I get the urge to break their legs with a baseball bat
and tell them to "walk it off."

I will let the moderators adjudicate this one.

Good article. I hear that phrase all to often and cringe each time I hear it. Bottom line is that there is no good cancer.

We've probably all heard the "good cancer" line, and I'm going to take the contrarian view...to a point. For most of us (the G9 crew is the exception), we DO have a better version of cancer than, say, Pancreatic. We do not have the cancer where we are told that no matter what they do, we'll be dead in 6 months or a year.

Yes, the emotional whiplash of a cancer diagnosis is very, very real. (I've experienced it twice for myself, and for both parents, and for one of my children--and may be hearing it next Friday about that same child in a different body part). And yet, once we climb off the ledge and start paying attention, we find out that what we have is (a) slow growing, if it's growing at all. (b) completely treatable with manageable side effects, and (c) gives us no reason to believe that we'll die young and in horrible pain.

When I put it in that perspective--that things could be a LOT worse--then it's much easier to practice gratitude, which makes me a lot easier to live with. I had this thought about this...and it's likely to piss a few of you off, but so be it. I can imagine what someone struggling with secondary hepatic cancer 3 years after major colon cancer surgery and chemo would say to me if I was talking about my occasional leakage as comparative to his suffering. Or if I try to imagine what it would be like to face a Whipple procedure (either before or after) in comparison to a RALP.

Now, to the author's point--that the radiologist had no business hazarding a guess as to what kind of cancer he had--he's right. That there is no good way to tell someone they have a potentially life threatening illness, he's right there too. But beyond that, as far as I'm concerned, I've been very, very fortunate in my personal diagnoses. IA and IB malignant melanoma and T2B prostate cancer is way, way better than stage 4 colon cancer.