Fighting For Your Life
Recently the well known American news anchor Peter Jennings died
of lung cancer, just a few months after he publicly announced
that he had the disease and that he was going to fight it with
everything he had. After his death, I read some of the tributes
that poured in about the life of Peter Jennings. One of the
common themes that appeared in the statements made by his
friends and colleagues was that they remembered what a
determined, competitive man he was.
They said that he took on his battle with cancer head on, and
that he fought his cancer the way he battled everything, with
steely will and determination. And unfortunately he didn't win.
Reading about Peter Jennings' losing battle with lung cancer
reminded me of another conversation I had had about cancer very
recently, a conversation that illustrated a different approach
to "fighting" the disease.
Last week I had a meeting with one of my business associates, a
man named Brian, to discuss some business matters.
After our business meeting was finished, Brian started telling
me about his mother's experience of living with cancer. A lot of
what Brian had to say was very thought provoking to me.
Brian told me that his mother had been diagnosed with a bad type
of bone cancer and doctors had told her that she had only a very
short time to live. Yet in spite of the fact that her cancer
kept spreading to other parts of her body, she managed to live
fourteen years longer than what her doctors had originally
predicted.
Brian said that he often wondered why his mother managed to live
such a long time with cancer when many of his younger friends
who got cancer died of it quite quickly.
Brian told me "I come from a sports and and athletic background,
and so a lot of my friends are athletes. My athletic friends
tend to be very focussed and competitive people, and they're
used to being very aggressive.
"When they were diagnosed with cancer, I watched them go into
their competitive and athletic mode, and they would say 'I'm
going to fight this thing'.
They would fight their cancer the same way they fought their
athletic battles, with gritted teeth and courage and
determination."
Brian said, "What I noticed about these guys who were so tough
and fought cancer so hard was that in a lot of cases they burned
out really soon.
"When my mother got cancer", Brian continued, "Her approach was
kind of the opposite. She wanted to live, but she never said she
was going to fight this cancer. One of the things I watched her
do is that she decided to drop everything that was stressful
from her life."
Shopping was stressful for her, so she dropped it. Driving a car
was stressful so she stopped driving. In fact, she stopped doing
everything she didn