Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.
Interpretation
Cancer can enhance our capacity for empathy, enabling us to support one another more effectively than before.
In this quote, Kelly Corrigan suggests that the experience of dealing with cancer can foster a deeper sense of empathy among individuals. This newfound empathy not only helps those suffering from cancer feel less isolated but also cultivates stronger connections and support networks that were previously absent, illustrating the transformative power of shared suffering and compassion.
In practice
During a speech at a cancer awareness event.
We'll bury our mothers and fathers - shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it.
By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.
Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
For people living with HIV, the knowledge that undetectable equals untransmittable is huge news, not only as a means of preventing transmission, but in breaking down the stigma that many people still experience.
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