These headlines about the deaths of David Bowie, Lemmy Kilmister or Guido Westerwelle, all caused by cancer, don’t leave me untouched. But the death of Miriam Pielhau, who added to that list recently, left me way more affected. Not because of the person she was, but because it rose the question which attitude a person with cancer should develop towards his or her illness.
Being a media person, Pielhau went public and wrote some best-selling books about her way of dealing with breast cancer. Her approach was holistic with a sturdy fighting spirit and strong hope being her major weapons. Tough as she was, she kept her head up even when her prognosis turned bad in 2015. And she seemed to be successful: Claiming to be healed, she issued her book “Dr. Hope – the story of a real wonder” in March 2016.
Now, less than four months later, she’s dead. The lesson I learn from Pielhau’s life is that cancer is highly unpredictable and that every case has it’s individual plot. And, that’s my conclusion, that every person has to find his or her very own way, according to who he or she is. More than one person suggested that Nadine should read “Dr. Hope”, but she hasn’t done so yet (nor did I). And I think she doesn’t need to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m convinced that the fighting way was exactly the right thing to do for somebody as strong as Pielhau, even though there was no wonder happening in the end.
But Nadine is a completely different person. She never had much fighting spirit and she was never the one to stand up for confrontation. Her extremely altruistic character is always craving for harmony, even when this means to endure some rigor herself. And she is also not the one who starts investigating her situation in every detail: She cannot enjoy any movies with people being terminally ill, she doesn’t like to talk about her own cancer story very much and she doesn’t want to listen to or read about those of other people.
The other day, we were talking to an oncologist in the newly founded department for naturopathy and integrative medicine at the Robert-Bosch-Hospital in Stuttgart. He told us that the paradigm cancer is regarded with is currently changing: Instead of viewing it as an enemy within the human body, more and more scholars tend to see cancer as something inevitably connected with the patient. Thinking this to it’s end, it shouldn’t be something the patient fights against, but something he learns to live with in coexistence. Nadine’s personality given, this direction is way more suitable for her than a fighting attitude. Which in the very end means that she doesn’t have to fight it, but to feel it.
