The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian’s fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.
I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.
In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer – any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer.
You hear the word ‘cancer,’ it scares you. You think of death.
If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, ‘Oh, God, we’ll never be able to tackle this!’ But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
Look, I’m a cancer survivor, all right? So I have great personal empathy for people who have pre-existing conditions and can’t get insurance.
I was actually very pleased that they let me do it, because I feel very deeply for breast cancer survivors. I don’t have it, but it is in my family. I’ve always been very aware of it. I go for mammograms and checkups.
Cancer doesn’t care if you have suffered before.
Why is there no cure for cancer? Because the medical industry doesn’t want one! And the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want one! Because they would lose too much money!
The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology.
If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain – if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I’d want that.
In the U.K., we have a paper called ‘The Daily Mail,’ which is quite misogynist. And every day, it just writes pieces about: ‘Women, you’re going to die now! Women, here’s shoes that give you cancer! Women, just hate yourselves!’
When they told me I had cancer – a very rare form called appendiceal cancer – I was shocked. But I went straight into battle mode. Every morning, I’d wake up and have an internal conversation with cancer. ‘All right, dude,’ I’d tell it, ‘go ahead and hit me. But I’m going to hit you back even harder.’
