So now you have cancer, things to know

Being told you have cancer is rather like being told that the mafia has put out a contract on you... an open-ended contract that could come due at any time. I have prostate cancer, which is another way to say that the killers after me are a little dumber and slower than some of the other cancers.

I want to speak to people who have been diagnosed with cancer. If someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer, I'm writing for you too.

I think it might be harder to love someone with cancer than to have it yourself. When I got sick, I told my wife I was going to fight it with everything I had. At that point, I didn't even know that my doctors at Cape Cod Hospital were going to fight with everything they had too. But when it's happening to someone you love, you can be supportive, even more loving than usual, if that's possible. But since it's not your illness, you know you can’t cure it… and that’s hard.

Support From Many Places

I've been a columnist for the Cape Cod Times for the last 38 years. When I published a New Year's column revealing that I had cancer, over 130 emails flooded in. About a third of them were simply well-wishers who wanted me to know I was in their prayers.  

A brief word about prayer. Even if you're a skeptic, scientific evidence exists that if people know they're being prayed for, that knowledge itself can boost the immune system and tip the balance toward recovery. And cancer can feel like a very lonely thing. I think prayer changes the person doing the praying too. We become more compassionate when we pray for others. 

When I was a young man in college studying philosophy, I thought that by my old age, I would have turned myself into some kind of sage, capable of explaining everything. Instead, the more I studied, the dumber I got. I won't dare suggest to you that I've got everything figured out, but I know there's something… something loves you and wishes you well. So, here's my first advice. If anyone offers you spiritual support or comfort, take it.

Another 30 or 40 letters were from people who had beaten cancers of all types and wanted me to know that I could beat it too. Most of this encouragement came from people I'd never met. You can do this. People are beating cancer all the time and you are going to be one of them.

The last 30 or 40 letters were from people undergoing cancer treatment right now. These letters were not only filled with encouragement but with specific practical advice.

The Power of Positivity

Marijuana is legal in Massachusetts, and it might be helpful. But it’s not a substitution for any of the medications you have been offered. And this gets me into another subject, something I have come to believe in deeply.

We've all heard about the placebo effect. What's interesting is that when patients are given a placebo - and told it's a placebo - they can still get relief from symptoms. We each have a world-class physician living inside our heads. We just haven't learned how to communicate with it. I have come to believe that in the war on cancer, your mind is your cannon.

I take 1000 milligrams of Abiraterone Acetate every day… four big pills. I pull the bottle out before I go to sleep, gently place my hands across the top of it, and I thank them for saving my life. I imagine energy - a blessing - radiating down my arms, through my hands and into the bottle. In the morning, I take my four pills out. I think of them as commandos being sent into battle. Each day I do this. “All right, troops,” I tell them, “let's kill some cancer.” 

When I was given my chemotherapy drugs, there was a bottle of pills to take for nausea and vomiting. I never had to use one of them; at this point, I don't even know where they are. I got a cheap fan for hot flashes. It collapses neatly to fit in my pocket. I take 540 mg of black cohosh root and 250 mg of chelated magnesium tablets daily, which helps reduce the frequency and intensity of my hot flashes. I’ve mounted a 3-inch battery-powered fan over my desk and it handles hot flashes easily.

Every day I went in for my radiation treatments, I welcomed them and said the same thing to the ladies I say to my pills every day, “let's kill some cancer.”

You should talk to your cancer every day. Profanity is not only acceptable; it's highly recommended. Watch at least 20 minutes of stand-up comedy every day. 

Embrace every medication, every treatment as a blessing. Open your mind and heart to the medications, the treatments, and the people giving them to you. The radiation machine is a cosmic ray gun. The pills you swallow are carpet-bombing enemy positions. Your white blood cells are Siberian huskies running to the sites of infection and chowing down the cancer.

You are not going to die, damn it, you are going to live. Please allow your cancer to do one thing for you before it goes away. Let it awaken the compassion that may have been sleeping in you for far too long. Tune your soul to the frequency of other people's suffering. God does not spare us from illness so we can watch TV.  

Not all of us are going to be cured. You know that. But we can all be healed. Go for that and I believe the rest will unfold as it should.

Lawrence Brown is a Sunday columnist for the Cape Cod Times and a cancer patient at Cape Cod Hospital since last January.