Something In the Air

When a Smoker Gets Lung Cancer, Sympathy Is Stained With Blame

By: Petula Dvorak Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

It took me a while to figure out why my dad refused the free blanket in the cancer ward.
The lady from the Cancer Society came into his room wheeling a cart stacked with colorful blankets. Crocheted by volunteers, they offered homespun comfort to folks recovering from surgeries that had cut out tumors, lesions, slabs of skin, pieces of colon, entire breasts or, in my father's case, a lobe of his left lung.
"No, not for me," said my father, a rugged brick mason who kicked his 45-year, pack-a-day smoking habit two months before the surgery.
I took one of the blankets for him, but for days it lay untouched on the chair in his hospital room. "That's for the other people," he said, pointing to rooms where cancer battles were also being fought.
My answer about his blanket aversion came a couple of days later. The stitches were bothering him, he was sick of the hospital food, but most of all, the 63-year-old fly fisherman who bicycles to work was furious at being debilitated. He offered the entire ordeal's one bit of analysis in his thick Eastern European accent.
"All these years of smoking. I had all that pleasure," he said. "Now, I pay."
He had been beating himself up for having lung cancer. And the rest of us in the family, though we didn't want to admit it, weren't exactly showering him with forgiveness.
It's a common syndrome for this particular type of cancer, which is consistently marginalized, stigmatized, under-funded and under-studied, even though it kills more people in the United States every year than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney and melanoma cancers combined, according to the Lung Cancer Alliance, an advocacy group in Washington.
It is becoming clear to patient advocates that the mental health of lung cancer patients -- who rarely get the positive reinforcement, unfettered support and kindness of society -- is also worth defending.
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