Ronald Lands a retired hematologist. He is an MFA alumnus of Queens University of Charlotte. His non-fiction essay, “A Promise of Rest” appears in the Fall 2024 Intima. Read our review of his poetry collection, Final Path.
In both the literary world and in the clinical world, metaphors take hold of our relationship to illness and health.
“Giving Up the Fight,” by Rebeca Stanfel (Spring 2023 Intima) is a first-person account of her struggle with sarcoidosis and the metaphors that complicated her ability to deal with it. Well-meaning friends and family assailed her with encouragement that depicted chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost. Stanfel examines this with an insightful survey of the salient arguments for and against the use of metaphors, ranging from Susan Sontag’s assertion that when it comes to illness, metaphors should always be avoided to Barbara Clow’s counter argument that “it is impossible to separate illness from its symbolic meaning.”
Stanfel’s epiphany occurred while undergoing a chemotherapy infusion. She realized that in the war she was being encouraged to fight, her body was the battlefield. Every day was a series of skirmishes, to get out of bed, to sit at the dinner table, to be with her husband and son. She was “at a stalemate in this forever war.” Then, based on her experience with 20 years of chronic illness, she rejected the battlefield metaphor and conceptualized it in a healthier way. She no longer fought sarcoidosis. They shared the same body. She lived with it, like a difficult roommate, and as a result, she was more productive, less bitter, much happier and had more empathy for herself and others.
In my own essay, “A Promise of Rest” (Fall 2024 Intima), depicts a patient and her doctor who had struggled with her cancer for several years, and followed the war path described in “Giving up the Fight.” Faced with a blood clot that would take her life if left untreated, the patient waved the white flag. The doctor resisted. Their physician-patient relationship had morphed into something else, a stronger bond forged from shared life-changing experiences. A night shift nurse nudged him back to the path he should have followed asking, “Shouldn’t she be on comfort care?” then noting “Sometimes it’s hard for us, too.”
Caregivers often share their patient’s metaphors for the same reasons, for encouragement, the illusion of control, and as a shield from reality. Stanfel reminds us that regardless of our concept of chronic illness, when the metaphors are removed, all that can be said is, “they lived, then they lived with a disease, and then they died. And so shall we all.”—Ronald Lands
Ronald Lands a retired hematologist. He is an MFA alumnus of Queens University of Charlotte. He practiced medicine for many years in East Tennessee where he grew up. He was privileged to treat strangers, lifelong friends and a few relatives. All of his writing originates from these experiences.