tumor humor

8/9/2019 Tumor Humor

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From the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programsconference in Denver, Colorado, my contribution to the "Sick Humor"

panel I participated in alongside Marya Hornbacher, PaulaKamen,Gina Barreca and S.L. Wisenberg, who put the whole thingtogether. The panel itself went really well-- all four of my fellowpanelists were not only really smart, but also really funny. I wasflattered to have been included.

What follows is the original script of what I had planned to say onThursday, April 8, 2010. I stuck pretty close to it, though towards theend I had to make some on-the-spot edits in order to stay within myallotted ten to twelve minutes.

Tumor Humor

When I think of humor writing about illness, I always think back to thisquote from Jack Handey, whose Deep Thoughts was a regularsegment on Saturday Night Live when I was in high school: Dadalways thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess waswhy several of us died of tuberculosis.

When I was first diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease Lymphoma inJanuary of 1998, I spent a lot of time onlinefrantic, late-night websearches for phrases like Hodgkins Disease or lymphoma death

statisticsand I came upon a lot of personal websites (we didntreally have blogs, back then) that contained what was labeled ashumor writing about my disease. I rarely found them funny. Lots of

jokes about baldness, or wearing silly hats. Amusing anecdotesabout people walking on eggshells around the patient. One guyactually even recorded himself vomiting from chemotherapytreatments, converted the recordings into sound files, and posted


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these files on the web.

I dont want to judge these people or their motivations; if theseexercises in trying to find the lighter side of their illness helped themcope with what they went through, improved their quality of life, thenIm glad that they started their websites. Not everyone has had myexperience with illness, or has my sense of humor. Nevertheless, Ihave to tell you that these websites made me want to cry. Thesepeople struck me as desperate to prove that cancer hadnt taken overtheir lives, and this desperate humor had the perverse effect ofdemonstrating just how obsessive they actually were about theirillness; these efforts called to mind Phillip Lopates observation inAgainst Joie de Vivre: Tell me, Lopate wrote, why would anyoneneed such a stylized, disciplined regimen of enjoyment if he were not

depressed? The truth is, their passionate insistence Im okayconvinced me that, in fact, they were not okaywhich meant to me,at the time, that I was not okay either.

When I think of the types of things that make me laugh YouTubesensation Garfunkle and Oates singing about the unbearablesmugness of their pregnant friends, Andy Samberg and T-Painrapping way too aggressively about something as mundane as sailingon a nice day, or pretty much any moment from Arrested

DevelopmentI tend to realize that humor (at least the humor I like)needs to somehow catch me off guard, present me with something Inever imagined seeing or hearing before. The secret to humor,

Aristotle wrote, is surprise. And so I suggest that part of the reasonsound files of cancer patients vomiting isnt funny is the same reasonthat Dane Cook talking about getting drunk in college isnt funnyitstoo obvious. Now, okay, surelistening to cancer patients vomit isprobably funnier than anything Dane Cook has ever done. But still.Cancer patients throw up; so do drunk college students. Is it really allthat funny, to have your expectations met?

We have, as a culture, created a language to describe cancer andcancer patients. We use words like brave, strong, courage, andinspiring when we talk about those who struggle with this disease. Inever appreciated having these words applied to meperhapsbecause I know how much of a cowardly weakling I really am.


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The type of humor I found online on those long nights that followedmy initial diagnosis were, I think, examples of humor that seek toreinforce these common perceptions of the chronically ill as people toadmire. There is an impulse to commend those who make fun ofthemselves, after all, so the woman who makes fun of her own hairloss or the guy who compares his chemotherapy regimen to doingshots of tequila gets a pat on the back for setting us at ease withsubjects as difficult as illness and mortality. In this way, I can see howthis type of humor is kind of reassuring for all, patient and healthyobserver alike.

But, as I said, its not particularly funny. And I dont feel like its all thathonest, either.

I didnt actually set out to write humorous essays about cancer.Having cancer well, sucked. I was physically ill. I lost my hair. Igained 50 pounds. I had violent mood swings as a result of thesteroids they were giving me. I was depressed. I drank too much. Onmy best days, I was bored out of my mind.

For a long time, I resisted the urge to write about my illness entirely. Ididnt trust myself to not write something simple-minded or clichd. Ihad no interest in writing something self-serving by claiming that

cancer patients were somehow heroic, and I couldnt in goodconscience try to describe myself in inspirational terms, withepiphanies and valuable lessons learned. Its not like I was a terribleor ignorant person before I developed cancer, but then becamethoughtful as a result of my malignancy. By the time I concluded mytreatments, I was still pretty much at the same level on the jerkscale as I had been when the ordeal started (that is to say, on ascale of 1 to 101 being Gandhi or Martin Luther King and 10 beingone of those doofuses from Jersey Shore, Im, like, a 6, 7 tops).

I also have to confess to some concern that my own anger wouldoverwhelm any narrative I tried to write about the experience.Because I was furious a lot of the time. I knew, logically, that thisanger was unjustifiableI had seen people in much worse shapethan me in the chemotherapy room and at the cancer center where Ihad my bone marrow transplant. I was going to surviveat least for awhile. I was in much better shape than most of the other cancer


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patients Id met.

But I was still mad. I was mad that my last semester of college hadbeen taken away from me, and that my friends were all starting theiradult lives while I was living in a den in my parents house that hadhastily been converted into a bedroom. I was mad that my on-again,off-again girlfriend had spent the time I was sick going to parties andhooking up with other guys. I was mad that there hadnt beensufficient research and government regulation to prevent people fromdumping carcinogens into streams, which caused hundreds ofmalignancies in my hometown of Gloversville, New York, and which Ihad become convinced had caused mine as well. Mostly, though, Iwas furious that this was how my life had turned out, this was whathappened to me.

But I work in a genre most commonly called creative nonfiction.That is to say, I write memoirs and personal essays, focusing onexploring the conflict in my own life and mind. And the truth is, notwriting about having had cancer wasnt really an option. I follow theexample of Michel de Montaigne, who famously wrote I want to beseen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining orartifice; for it is myself that I portray. If I am to turn my life intoliterature, if I am to create as complete a portrait of myself as

possible, then I cant leave out something as big as having hadcancer when I was 22-years-old. It had far too great an impact on mylifeleaving it out would be akin to lying.

The goal of the nonfiction writer is to write as complete and thoroughan account of his thoughts or a time in his life as possible. Theessayist is obligated to look at his life in a holistic way, focusing onthe relationships between disparate memories and ideas and howthese relationships shape his own mind. Whereas the novelist willstructure her narrative so that it follows a certain arc involving action,

conflict, cause, and effect leading towards some type of climax orepiphany, the nonfiction writer lacks the structure that inventionallows; instead, he must try to find the connections that exist in hisown life, locate the threads that link his ideas and actions to eachother.

In a sense, the nonfiction writer is like a doctor, who frequently must


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also make connections among seemingly-unrelated phenomena inorder to come to a diagnosis.

So if Im to write of my own life, I concluded, I must also write of myown illness, because it shaped and continues to shape who I am insome pretty fundamental ways. So I began to write about the pain,the biopsies, the diagnosis, the treatments, and, of course the fear.But I struggled to keep the account honest, to resist the urge to usefamiliar language or devolve into sentimentality. This resulted in a lotof stuff thrown outmy book, in its current draft on my hard drive, is260 pages long; Ive probably removed or abandoned at least thatmany pages as I found myself exploring ideas that, I realized, werentreally mine, but were instead the sorts of things I thought ought tobe in a cancer narrative.

So Ive cut out the chapter about my first chemotherapy treatment(the only information the chapter conveyed, really, is thatchemotherapy makes you throw upwho knew?). I cut the chapterthat described the kindly old man who got chemotherapy at the sametime I did (as I reflected more, I realized that he wasnt quite the life-affirming, sagacious, Tuesdays With Morrie-type Id made him; hewas just an old guy with cancer who occasionally made small talk). Icut the part where I found out that my cancer had come back after

just one month in remission (this cut I kind of feltthere was a nicescene where the technician performing my scans and I sneakedcigarettes while the machine was getting recalibrated; there wassomething charmingly stupid about a medical technician and a cancerpatient smoking together while waiting to find out the extent of thepatients illness; in the end, it was the right thing to do, though,because the rest of the chapter was light on the insight and heavy onthe maudlin).

In his book The Illness Narratives, Dr. Arthur Kleinman suggests that

physicians frequently focus too closely on disease, and not enoughon illness. That is to say, doctors consider their patients biologicalproblems in something of a bubble, without considering the way thoseproblems relate to their emotional and social well-being. Thus, adoctor may treat a male patient with a heart condition with medicationthat causes erectile dysfunction. Once the heart condition is broughtunder control, the physician would be inclined to pronounce the


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patient cured. And yet, the patient himself now suffers fromdiminished self-esteem, possibly even depression over his lost sexlife. The loss of intimacy may threaten his marriage. He may find itdifficult to motivate himself to go to work, such is the depth of hisdespondency. So though his biological complaint has been treated,his quality of life has remained the same, or perhaps evendeteriorated, as a result of this treatment.

Kleinmans suggestion, then, is for doctors to regard their patients asmore than just organisms presenting biological symptoms, andinstead employ what he calls a psychosocial approach to medicine,taking into account the patients background, lifestyle, job, religiousbeliefs, hobbies, and other factors that may be important to hisconception of self. Similarly, I feel like its incumbent on the

nonfiction writer who writes about medical issues to focus on morethan just the nausea or the pain or the indignity of being ill. Yes, thosethings matter, and yes, they belong in a narrative about illness, nodoubt, but thats probably not all there is to the patients illnessexperience (to use Kleinmans preferred term).

What I realized, as I began writing about my own illness experience,was that while this was no doubt the scariest and saddest time in mylife, it wasnt quite as dreary as I had been led to believe it would be.

Most of us have seen depictions of cancer in movies or TV showswe know about the pernicious effects of chemotherapy and radiation.Were familiar with the stereotype of the inhumanly-detached doctormore concerned with cells than people. We know how cancer causesanxiety and fear.

But what you might not realize is, its not always like that. Nobody cancry all the time. I had chemotherapy treatments once every twoweeks, which meant that I had, on average, three bad days out ofevery fourteen. Thats not too terrible. And in the meantime, life went

on. And life, to me, frequently means laughing.

One of my very earliest memories is of my dad laughinga deep,enthusiastic, out-of-control laugh that I think I may have inheritedfrom him. My dad laughed frequentlystill does, really. And when Ilived with my parents, we often laughed together. Sometimes, it wasat stuff we watched on TVother times, it was at stuff we said to


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each other. My father and I both enjoy swearing, and we bothconcluded that there was something funny about calling each otherdickweed while I was sick.

As I said at the start of this talk, I wasnt really interested in writinghumorous essays about having cancer, and to be honest Im notalways sure thats what Ive actually done. I dont want to give anyonethe impression that cancer itself is funnyI sometimes worry that if Iwrite with too much humor about my illness experience, I might givepeople the impression that cancer isnt such a big deal, or that itssomething most people can handle with relative ease. This isnt thecase, and I sometimes worry that the benefit of hindsight andknowing how it all turned out might cause me to overlook howterribleand terrifyingthe experience was as I write about it. We

must all be vigilant about raising money for research, providing healthcare and other forms of support for those who need it, and holdingour government and certain industries responsible for thecarcinogens that have been forced upon us. I dont want anyaesthetic decisions I make as a humor writer to eclipse thesepolitical and social realities.

What Ive done, in my writingwhat Ive always tried to doispresent an honest account of my own life, without straining or artifice,

so that others might try to see the world from my point-of-view for alittle while (this is why some of us love nonfiction, reallyits not self-absorption, its an attempt to connect with other human beings whoseminds would otherwise remain unexplored territory for us). The fact ofthe matter is, Ive lived a life so full of joy and laughter, to not includehumor would be to misrepresent my life and my self.

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