Thursday, February 4 is the fifth annual World Cancer Day, sponsored by the International Union Against Cancer (UICC). Their slogan this year – the third in their Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s World campaign – is:

Cancer Can be Prevented, Too.

When I read the tweets announcing that slogan, my first thought was o. m. g.

Anyone who’s spent any time in cancer support groups, whether face-to-face or online, has seen the self-blame-game played in a thousand variations. Newly diagnosed and treated patients are desperate to figure out why me?

What could I have done to prevent this from happening to me?
or
I’ve had surgery/chemo/radiation – how do I keep the cancer from coming back?

There are a hundred answers besides the latest treatments and chemo regimens. Compulsive exercise. Rigorous (and often unsubstantiated) dietary changes and restrictions. Supplements. Alternative therapies. Coming (or running) to jesus. Crystals. Meditation. Wheatgrass drinks with every meal. Juicing, or juice fasts. Colon cleanses. Coffee enemas (you can’t make this stuff up.) Prayer circles and healing ministries. And those are just the support groups.

Let’s not forget the media reports that latch onto the latest sound byte – drink red wine, don’t drink any alcohol, dark chocolate is the best preventative, sugar will feed your cancer, a mediterranean diet (which of the 15 mediterranean countries has the perfect one?), don’t eat red meat, don’t eat processed meat, begome a vegan, I cured my cancer by forsaking chemo and eating mushrooms, and on and on and on.

The true danger in all of the self-doubt is not that we examine our lives and our habits. In fact, after a life-changing event like a cancer dx, a little self-examination is a healthy thing. But the true danger is in assigning unquestionable self-blame for making past choices. What we’ve done is in the past, and we may not have believed (at the time) that our choices were inappropriate. The true danger is that no matter what the ‘preventative’ advice, there is somebody (maybe a lot of somebodies) who did exactly that prevention method — and still got cancer.

I was dx’d with stage IV rectal cancer with extensive mets to my liver. I’d had eight years of fecal occult blood tests (FOBTs) which are the standard of care for preventative screening in people under 50 who have no family history of CRC and no symptoms. That’s right – NO SYMPTOMS. My cancer was silent but deadly, and by the time I had symptoms – a bare eight weeks before my dx – my symptoms were life-threatening. I lost weight (3 lbs/week.) My liver enzymes shot to triple the high normal value. I began to experience liver pain. I was unable to regulate my temperature; if I got chilled, I stayed cold.

Those were my symptoms. I didn’t have years of blood in my stool, bloating and changes in bowel habits or stool that I ignored.

Oh, and did I mention that for most of my 20s and 30s, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian or pescatarian (fish-eater)? Yep, I naturally followed a version of the ‘mediterranean diet’ that is now so highly touted as cancer-protective. I guess I chose the wrong mediterranean countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Lebanon, Morocco. Too bad I didn’t make better choices from the other countries that surround the big inland sea.

I exercised too – a regular gym rat. I was always a little overweight, the high end of the body fat percentage at around 28%. But I hit the gym to lift weights and do 15 minutes of cardio every other day, 24/7/365. Only injury kept me from the gym – and even injury didn’t stop my exercises as I worked the body systems and parts that weren’t injured.

I’m not sure I could have prevented my cancer.

I know that it makes me a little crazy when other people preach prevention as a way to raise awareness. To me, it’s kinda like preaching abstinence to kids in lieu of answering their questions and teaching them how to be responsible about their sexuality.

Prevention? Sorry, UICC – that horse has left the barn.
Do you feel like you could have, or should have, had better/different habits which would have prevented your cancer?