Should people living with cancer be referred to as cancer survivors? Mary from Delafield, Wisconsin, a breast cancer survivor herself, doesn’t like the term. Nor does Indiana University professor emerita Susan Gubar, who discusses this in an eloquent New York Times blog post. Many people living with cancer feel that the word survivor, which came into vogue in the early 90s, now seems inadequate. Some argue that having cancer shouldn’t be their most important identifying feature. Others suggest calling themselves contenders or grits. Have a better idea? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cancer Survivors”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Mary Rowling, and I’m calling from Delafield, Wisconsin.
Hi, Mary. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Mary. What’s up?
Well, I have a little trouble with the word survivor. I am a survivor of cancer, but I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find another word, and I wish there was a noun for prevail, because I think that’s about the way I feel about it.
You are the prevailer.
Yeah, because survivor smacks of victim, and I don’t like victim either.
-huh, -huh.
That’s really interesting because survivor replaced victim pretty much.
Yes, it did.
Back in the early 90s, if you look at the graphs from the corpus, the word survivor came along as a sort of triumphant alternative to victim, right?
I guess maybe I associate it more with the victim, and I don’t get that feeling of triumph from it.
Well, I’m fascinated that you raised this question because I have a friend who is a 32-year survivor of breast cancer. She had a mastectomy in 1981, and she was saying the same thing to me recently, that in its day, in the early 90s, when it really started to be used a lot, survivor made a lot of sense, but now it’s become watered down, and she’s looking for a different word, too.
Well, can you make a noun out of prevail? What would that be? Prevailer? Victor?
Yeah, it would be prevailer. Victor sounds a little militant.
Yeah, and contrived.
You know, last fall, Mary, there was a piece in the New York Times. Well, actually it was on its website, in the Well blog, and it’s a blog kept by people who are undergoing cancer treatment or somehow are involved with the data of this. And the woman named Susan Gubar, G-U-B-A-R, she also talked about survivor having problems. And she said the term sounds too heroic to claim for ourselves. She was unwilling to even call herself a survivor because she didn’t feel like it was all that great an accomplishment.
But there were other people in the comments who had a lot of other reasons for disliking survivor. Some said the same thing that you said, Mary, that they felt that it smacked a victim or that there was just too much about it that had turned negative for them. Others aren’t even sure that they are survivors. They feel like they’re in a holding pattern and waiting for it to recur. Others worry that, well, they’re actually not survivors because they’re still undergoing treatment. They still have the regular doctor visits. They still have the medicine that they take maybe to compensate for the chemo treatments and that sort of thing. They’re still living with cancer. They’re still living with it, even though it might not actually be found in their body.
Yeah.
I agree with that. For me, anyway, I don’t regard cancer as a great tragedy. There’s a lot of worse things that can happen to human beings out there. What I do see is that it’s just a blip in the road, something I have to deal with and go on. I’ve won the battle, and none of us will ever win the war. We’re all mortal.
Right.
Exactly.
So it’s just another thing to deal with with life. I was interested in the comments because some of them didn’t want to use the word survivor because they thought it might jinx them. They thought that calling themselves survivors, and it’s that kind of childish superstition that we all have that mentioning a thing will make it happen. And you can kind of appreciate that your mind is in a weird emotional state, right? There are lots of things swirling around that sometimes aren’t clear, and you fall back to those old ways of thinking.
The author, by the way, she did suggest other possible terms, and none of them with a great deal of gusto, but I’ll read them here to you if you’re interested.
Okay.
Cancer contenders, cancer lifers, cancer dealers, cancer mavens, and grits. G-R-I-T-S, grits.
Grits.
I like grits. Some other people chose warrior. They liked warrior, and that is very militant.
Yeah, the body is battlefield. You’re mustering your resources, everything that you have, all the people at your disposal, everything that you can afford to fight this thing. It is almost a war.
Mary, do any of those appeal to you?
I like the nuances of some of them, but there’s not one that really says it. But I guess, I don’t know, I don’t want to be defined by a disease.
Well, we’ll just call you Mary.
Oh, peachy, that’s great. And we want to thank you for calling. And Mary, I am sure that we’re going to get a lot of calls and emails about this. So stay tuned to future shows when we’ll try to offer you some other ideas, okay?
That’s great. Thank you.
Our pleasure. Thank you for calling today.
Thank you, Mary.
You’re welcome. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Email us, words@waywordradio.org.
