Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths

Science writers tend to approach their subjects with great interest, but dispassionately. They don't want to let their emotions colour their research or cloud their judgement. 

That may be difficult when the subject is cancer … a disease that has almost unrivalled power over our psyches, stoking dread in our minds at its fearsome destruction of the bodies of people close to us … and at what it could to our own some day.

It was harder still for Alanna Mitchell to be purely objective and unemotional in her study of cancer. Her brother-in-law's cancer diagnosis spurred her to undertake an investigation of cancer, its causes and treatments. And while she was helping her brother-in-law navigate the bewildering landscape of prognoses, therapies and shifting odds of a positive outcome … her 21-year-old daughter was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

She found herself grappling with all the fear, guilt, shame, anxiety, confusion, mixed messages and other cultural baggage with which cancer is bound up.

And she was witness to the feeling that comes with a cancer diagnosis that you have been selected, for whatever reason, to enter the ring and do battle with a formidable foe. It's a daunting prospect, but with enough pluck, determination and positivity, you can vanquish the Goliath cancer, and even if you don't win this challenge, you are expected to go down fighting. 

Alanna Mitchell is a journalist, a science educator and the author of the award-winning Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis … which has been adapted into a one-woman play that has toured internationally. Her new book is called Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths.