Unfashionable Cancer Stigma

by Mav_Fan | November 26, 2008 at 02:27 pm

490 views | 54 Recommendations | 8 comments

This is a photo of my mother on her wedding day in 1957. After a life of NOT smoking and not living with a smoker and not allowing smoking in her house, she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in the summer of 2000. After a long courageous battle with this horrible malady, she passed away in November of 2003.
When you tell people you lost your mother to cancer, they are immediately sympathetic. When they ask what type of cancer and they hear it was lung cancer they react in a shocking manner, immediately the say, "Ohhhhh, lung cancer." As if having lung cancer no longer makes their death a tragedy, as if they deserved to die from this disease. When you then explain that your loved one never smoked, their faces show immediate confusion. Almost like you suddenly began to speak a foreign language to them.
People die from lung cancer everyday and their loved ones are made to feel as if their loss is less important or less sympathetic because it was, in their opinion, self inflicted.
After living with the stigma of losing a family member to this 'unfashionable cancer' I truly believe NO victim or their loved ones should be made to feel this disrespect, no matter what their personal habits, it shouldn't matter if they smoked five packs of cigarettes a day, or none, they suffer horribly enough through the disease, they shouldn't have to suffer from the stigma as well.

My mum also had lung cancer - and also a non-smoking related form of lung cancer. She underwent months of radiation and chemo and that was five years ago and although she is still being monitored every 6 months, she is doing well, and I am thankful everyday for that.

I know exactly what you mean about the stigma surrounding lung cancer - when I tell people what happened with my mum I get the same reaction and then I have to explain she didn't smoke - it wasn't self-inflicted.

I am sorry your mum didn't make it. It is really a terrible disease.

Thanks for your kind words and sympathies, they are truly appreciated.

Please give your mum an extra hug next time you see her. It's great to hear someone is doing well with this hideous disease, the cancer is bad enough without having to endure the stigma associated with it.

I am sorry for your loss and the shame you may sometimes feel when people treat the death of your mother differently than if she dies of some other cause. As someone who has lost both his parents to lung cancer (and both were smokers) I beg to differ with your main point, however.

If the shame of smokers self-inflicting their disease helps some people to choose not to smoke or to quit then I think it is justified. I would say the same about people who overdose on drugs, drink their livers into cirrossis or die in a car crash street racing. They are all at least partially to blame for their own preventable deaths. If those of us who survive face a little public condensation for the way our loved once died but others are saved from making bad lifestyle choices I will face the criticism.

It's really not just lung cancer that carries this stigma. Many cancer survivors will tell you that they get a "they must have deserved it" vibe as well. A girl I know had ovarian cancer, she is a 3 year survivor, and she has told me that many people automatically assume she was promiscuous and had an STD which caused the cancer. She even had one woman in a cancer support group tell her that her cancer must have been caused by taking birth control pills!

People often react with ignorance when something scares them. Cancer is a pretty scary thing.

May I add my sympathies for the early loss of your mother. All cancers are nasty things, but I've heard that lung cancer is particularly bad. Nobody deserves an illness.

My Father Mother did die of Lung Cancer as well and she did not smoke either nor did here Husband or any one else in the house or near her.

My mother has cancer also, but she is not fighting a courageous battle. She is embracing the cancer, living life as though it didn't exist, enjoying life to the fullest. She opted for no surgery, no chemo, no radiation, just accepts it as part of the cycle of life. She was told she would only have a few months to live if she didn't have major surgery, chemo and radiation, that was three years ago.

I admire her for being able to put it out of her mind, I don't know how she does it. I am proud to be her son and her caregiver.

Thanks to all of you who made my very first NP story such a success, I really appreciate it.

To:eastvanray, I definitely understand your point about bad lifestyle choices, I really do. I'm just trying to say that if you knew someone who lost a loved one to, borrowing one of you examples, a car crash while street racing, I would not be able to bring myself to say to the bereaved, 'Sorry about your loved one's death, but really they brought it on themselves you know.' It would be, in my opinion, not only insensitive, but rather rude. I just feel people are less constrained where lung diseases (and other unfashionable maladies) are concerned. It could be just as Tina Kells mentioned, people react strangely to things which scare them, and true enough, cancer is so scary.

To:Tina Kells The reaction to your friends ovarian cancer is shocking! I'm glad she is surviving, in the face of such a reaction to her disease. But I say again, nobody with ANY type of cancer should be made to feel belittled or ashamed, but you're right, cancer is very scary, so I'm sure that is what is driving at least some of the stigma.

To: Barbara McPhersonThank you very much.

To:PaschenI think the cases of non smokers getting lung cancer should definitely be discussed more, so that the people who tend to think only smokers are affected could come to realize lung cancer doesn't really discriminate. That way more people might be better educated about this disease, how many people it kills and how devastating it is to the victim and their families, no matter if they smoked or not.

To:cledryYou definitely should be proud of your mother, what a brave woman. The first thing my mom's oncologist said to her, (and I truly believe this is something the doctor's who like to 'predict' a person's remaining life span based on medical tests), 'If a doctor tells you that you only have X amount of time left, you should run away from them as fast as you can. No doctor has that kind of insight, prediciting how people react, mentally and physically, to cancer is just not possible." I wish more doctors had that attitude, I truly think his attitude helped my mother survive longer than most would have suspected. I looked it up on the web and most victims who were diagnosed with the type and severity of my mother's cancer died well before a year after the diagnosis, but her doctor never even hinted at that grim statistic.