Caught Between Two Gods

July 8, 2009

I am caught between two gods. Two gods at war with each other.

The god of Western, allopathic medicine says that chemo, surgery and radiation are the most wonderful tools for the treatment of cancer. They are so effective that, why, for people with IBC about 1/3 (maybe up to ½) survive the disease!

My response is that 1/3 survive the disease and the treatment.

When people die, does the Allopathic God admit that one contributing factor may have been the way the allopathic treatment debilitated the body so that it couldn’t mount its own best defense against the cancer? No. The Allopathic God says only that the cancer killed the patient.

When people are put into remission but the cancer recurs in a few years, does the Allopathic God say that it’s possible that the treatments administered in his name so debilitated the body that it couldn’t fully fight off an errant cancer cell…and it wound up getting sick again? No. The Allopathic God owns no such responsibility.

Instead, the Allopathic God says that the cancer recurred despite his best treatments—casting the blame entirely upon the cancer and rejecting a serving for himself.

The Alternative God is not much better. I suspect that if he were not threatened with offending the Church of the Allopathic God (the AMA), he would make bolder claims for himself. But as it is, circumstances force him to be a more modest god.

The Alternative God says that cancer is a thing that happens all the time in the human body. Little cancer cells form, but they get swept away by a healthy body, whose immune system reacts to scavenge them and haul them off. When that goes awry, cancer develops.

The logical treatment, then, is to boost the immune system—the ability of the body to fight off cancer. Given the right nutritional factors, the body will heal itself and the cancer will be a thing of the past.

If the cancer is not cured or if it comes back years later, then Alternative God says it’s because of the patient. He or she had such an unhealthy lifestyle that the cancer was too far gone. It couldn’t be treated in time by the natural agents.

Neither form of treatment blames itself. It will blame the cancer or blame the patient – but never itself as a system perhaps inadequate to the task at hand.

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It’s all made so much worse by the fact that each god holds the other in contempt, and each one threatens its devotees that if they are so foolish as to believe in what the other god says, they will surely die.

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I have always said that there was no need for me to have cancer insurance, because if I ever got cancer, I’d rely on alternative treatments, and none of those are covered under cancer insurance. (Ironically, this year when it was time to sign up for benefits at work, I contemplated getting the cancer insurance, but decided against it for precisely this reason. Was it yet another adumbration of things to come?)

Yet here I am today. I have a fast-growing cancer that tends to metasticize, and I am rushing to embrace the Allopathic God.

I am rushing, because I am afraid to do anything less. But I am fighting that Allopathic God and calling him names and calling him to account for his inadequacies as a deity. If he would just come down off his mighty, haughty throne….!

Instead, like Toto, I am pulling the curtain back to expose the bottom line of the impressive display of power that is laid out in front of us at Lineberger Cancer Center. The promise that Oz, the Great and Powerful, can help everyone. Or at least, if anyone can help, Oz can.

I am asking the Allopathic God to admit that he is, in fact, just a balloonist from Kansas. Not the mighty, omniscient wizard he claims to be. To admit, as the balloonist later does, that he doesn’t have great magic. That what he has to share are really baubles and buttons in terms of getting me where I want to go…but it is the best he has, and he will share.

My struggle with the Alternative God seems to be more of a struggle with guilt and anxiety over abandoning him so quickly. I have been a faithless disciple. But the truth is, while I want very much to believe that he and he alone can cure me, I don’t.

Perhaps if I had a different kind of cancer, at a lower grade, I would. But that is not the case. Maybe this is the “gift” of having IBC – that it has propelled me into a crisis of healthcare faith. I have to make a choice.

I just don’t know what kind of rational grounds to make that choice on.

The Allopathic God is a cruel, cruel god. His ways are barbaric. They are torture. But we have some idea of how effective they are. He refuses to admit that he kills some of his devotees, as I believe he does, but there is no denying that he saves quite a few of them, too.

The Alternative God’s ways are not cruel. They are gentle, natural, peaceful. Maybe a bit of a struggle to live up to all of the health and lifestyle demands, completely. But still within the realm of do-able. Of course, we have no hard data on how many of his devotees he saves—because, as he will point out, all of the money for conducting such studies goes to the Allopathic God. So the devotee is forced to rely mostly on the claims of the Alternative God as to his ultimate curative powers.

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I need to find a way to laugh at them both. To roll my eyes at their claims, to see their inadequacies, and find a way to take both with just the right amount of gravity and a large, large grain of salt...and to refuse to give in to their fear-producing tactics when they each puff themselves up and warn me that I’m going to die if I don’t listen to them.

I need to find a way to be a devotee of neither god, and yet of both gods.