Fighting cancer or fighting society’s mentality about it?

A metaphor is a word or phrase that makes a direct comparison and describes an idea, but how can a disease be described by metaphors? we will analyze it. In her book “Illness as a Metaphor,” Susan Sontag—who was diagnosed with breast cancer to the lymph node —exposes how the use of punitive metaphors has led to the negative stigmatization of cancer in our society and has a detrimental effect on patients, denying them the feeling of hope and frequently prevents them from seeking appropriate treatment. The book “The Cancer Journals” by Audre Lorde serves as further evidence of the use of metaphors in medicine. It depicts, once more through the patient’s eyes, how some metaphors are employed to express a patient’s experience, in this case, her, a woman coping with breast cancer, to express the woman’s pain, and to reflect the difficulty to deal with the physical loss of a breast. These two women shared their personal experiences with this illness, emphasized breast cancer, and worked to dispel the myth and wrong idea that “cancer is a curse” in the public’s eyes. 

In her book, Audre Lorde writes “Patients are ultimately guilty,” “Society Thinks of Cancer as a Crime.” A crime is something you choose to do but cancer is a disease, it is not attracted to or given to a specific individual and through this metaphor, Audre tries to reflect how the people around a patient compare the burden of carrying this disease to the suffering of being a criminal with a sentence, which should be avoided. In her book, Susan Sontag provides yet another example of how society views “cancer as a morally infectious disease,” further highlighting the impact of social exclusion and rejection that a cancer patient experiences. Susan Sontag also dispels the notion in the Stendhal Armance book where she writes “the fear of pronouncing the word will accelerate the course of your child’s course,” demonstrating how the ignorance or lack of knowledge of the people at that time had about this disease causing them to be fearful and anxious about a supposed course, ultimately leading to not even wanting to pronounce its name, cancer.

To illustrate how tumors are perceived, Susan Sontag quotes an excerpt from Alice James’ 1892 book, “This unholy substance on my breast,” in which she compares her tumor to something repugnant and unattractive. Almost similar to Lorde’s book, since she says “the recurrent tumor will be masked” to discuss her tumor, trying to emphasize the desire of a cancer patient to conceal this disease as much as possible. Add to this, after her mastectomy, a procedure in which she got removed one of her breasts, she wrote “breast cancer as a cosmetic problem,” aligning with ” the idea of a woman with one breast as a threat to morale”, comparing to how some cosmetic companies get to profit from cancer’s patients by designing prosthesis to make a woman more desirable and “more normal”. A prosthesis was not an option for her, since Lorde says that when she used it she felt like she had a“ lambswool puff stuck in her bra”. 

Another similar idea in both texts is about how long the process of dealing with cancer takes since both authors use cancer as a long-term disease in their books. Susan Sontag compares “Cancer as a disease of idleness and laziness,” giving the reader a mental image of how this disease slowly destroys a patient’s body and illustrating how the fight against it requires a lot of time because laziness is a term that describes exhaustion despite having the capacity to act. To support this idea, Audre Lourde compared herself to a “resist fighter instead of a passive victim” in her book, demonstrating that the support and mentality that a person should have towards a patient with cancer doesn’t have to be immediately pitiful; rather, a person has to see them as warriors since they are fighting a long battle, and having to deal with the most fearful illness around the globe. 

Both authors are female, and they illustrated their personal experiences with breast cancer to write their books. The basic analogy of “disease and metaphor” is expanded upon by Susan Sontag, who demonstrates how metaphorical language can negatively affect patients, leading to making them feel discouraged, silenced, and shamed. The Cancer Journals, written by Audre Lorde, has a little different goal; it is an invitation to women who have survived breast cancer to consider the meaning of the illness in their lives, she is not particularly putting a focus on using metaphor in medicine, she does use some to describe her suffering, treatment, and the process of being a patient with cancer. 

 Susan Sontag through her book works to stop people from referring to cancer only as a death sentence. Susan Sontag demonstrates how there is still hope for a sick person and how improper metaphor use can destroy it. She is against the use of metaphors in medicine, since it can deny people this sense of hope, and has criminalized society as well as each individual. Lorde in this essay is the patient using metaphors and describing herself through it, so after all this essay demonstrates how two women with the same disease can see the use of metaphor as something good and bad. Lorde’s story has nothing to do with presenting an opinion about metaphors since she relates her experience of a significant personal change in her story, but as a reader, I consider that she does not like metaphors created by society about cancer, but she uses it to describe herself, her tumor, her prosthesis and that is the part in which the use of metaphors can be good, this is only my opinion about what her text reflects me. To conclude, the fear of a woman having cancer is depicted in both texts, with the main emphasis on leaving a message of outrage at the standards of both society and the healthcare sector regarding this illness.