There's been something that's been bugging me for the past week. It's a conversation I had with an oncology nurse during treatment last Friday. I was regaling her with a story about a random student from another campus who stopped me in the hall to ask me if I was a cancer survivor. I told the student that no, I was a cancer patient. The student then told me that her mother had just finished breast cancer treatment and that she hoped that I would be better soon. The nurse then said "You're wrong. You are a cancer survivor." She then went on to explain that apparently sometime in the past 6 years (from when I last went through cancer treatment), the medical field considers anyone who gets a cancer diagnosis is considered a cancer survivor from the time of diagnosis until end of life. I came home and did a little research and discovered that is the current definition.
Okay, I know I'm nitpicking here, but as I've mentioned I'm a crazy word/grammar Nazi and this change annoys me beyond belief. I decided to look up the definition of "survivor" in a reputable dictionary. (After the whole "literal" debacle, I don't entirely trust every dictionary.) Therefore, I checked both the Oxford English Dictionary and Dictionary.com and they both had a similar definition of survivor and survive:
Survivor: a person or thing that survives.
Survive: to get along or remain healthy, happy, and unaffected in spite of some occurrence.
The definition of survive is the perfect indication of how battling cancer is not surviving cancer! Can anyone going through cancer treatment remain healthy, happy, and unaffected?? Erm, nope! So while I get why the medical community has decided to put a positive spin for those patients going through treatment, it is imprecise and I don't like it. Therefore, I don't care how much a nurse tells me that I'm a survivor, I will continue to disagree.
Truth is: I suppose I could be called both. I technically survived breast cancer, but currently am an endometrial cancer patient.
2 comments:
Call it what you want. Just don't let them call you handicapable. Don't you just love THAT word?
Ha -- so long as you can breathe, you are surviving. It may not be pretty some days, but its another day on the books. ;)
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