Cancer & The Mind – The Emotional Toll

When Stephanie Sands shared her story with me it brought back memories from when I was pallbearer at my best friend's funeral in high school. I asked her permission to share her observations.

Cancer & The Mind – The Emotional Toll

I’ve recently been working with an AI system, running various tests that I won’t bore you with. One of our conversations prompted some genuine self-reflection, which led me back to Schitt’s Creek for a second viewing. This time, I learned something quite profound.

Cancer did not just change my body. It changed the emotional lens through which I experienced the world. One of the strangest things I noticed after my diagnosis was that I stopped finding many things funny. Humor began to feel distant, artificial, or emotionally disconnected from the reality I was living in. I just couldn’t relate. I found myself gravitating toward mystery, psychological dramas, thrillers, existential stories, and I did read books related to my illness, which I could relate to more easily.

When I was recovering in the hospital after my neck dissection and soft palate resection, I was reading When Breath Becomes Air. Looking back, that choice says a great deal about the psychological space I was in. I was not searching for escape. I was searching for honesty and relatability. The book did not avoid fear, mortality, uncertainty, or the collapse of assumed permanence. It confronted all of those things directly, and because of that, it felt emotionally real to me in a way that lighter material, like comedy, couldn’t do.

Cancer introduced me to this level of vulnerability that permanently altered how I interpreted stories, entertainment, and even other people. Before cancer, humor and ordinary entertainment were effortless to me; I never took the time to think about why that was, as there was no reason to. After cancer, especially during treatment and recovery, many forms of entertainment suddenly seemed shallow or emotionally unrelatable. My mind was no longer operating in the same psychological environment. I had crossed into a reality where scans determined my fate, pathology reports carried enormous emotional anxiety, and every follow-up appointment carried the possibility of life-changing news.

I think this changes a person’s relationship with storytelling. Serious illness strips away the illusion that life is stable or guaranteed. Psychological thrillers, mysteries, and existential dramas often feel more truthful after cancer because they acknowledge uncertainty. They accept that fear exists beneath ordinary life. They explore hidden danger, tension, mortality, and the fragility of human beings. Those themes no longer feel abstract after illness. They feel familiar.

I also feel cancer creates a kind of heightened psychological surveillance state. I constantly felt like I was on alert. After diagnosis and treatment, the mind becomes trained to search for hidden threats: recurrence, symptoms, scan results, side effects, changes in the body. In many ways, mystery and thriller narratives mirror that exact mental posture. They revolve around searching for hidden meaning beneath the surface, identifying danger before it fully reveals itself, and living with unresolved uncertainty. That emotional structure felt far more relatable to me than carefree comedy because I was living with that unresolved uncertainty.

At the same time, humor itself became more complicated. I don’t think I lost my sense of humor entirely. I think humor requires a certain feeling of safety and emotional distance that serious illness can temporarily destroy. When a person is confronting mortality, physical trauma, and possible disfigurement, or survival itself, the mind often becomes more focused on meaning than amusement. My mind was seeking depth, coherence, and emotional truth rather than a distraction.

Over time, I noticed that humor slowly began returning, but it returned differently. It no longer felt automatic or superficial. It felt more deliberate and more precious. There is something profound about laughing again after a person has lived through a period where laughter felt psychologically inaccessible. It changes the meaning of joy itself. When I was going through my first treatment, it seemed my cancer specialists were all watching Schitt’s Creek, and I could not relate to it at all. My husband watched it while I ended up reading something. 

Recently, I have been doing some self-reflection about other things that I had a difficult time understanding and forced myself into others’ shoes. This started with a technical exercise that expanded into more personal reflection. During this reflection, I thought I would just give Schitt’s Creek another chance, and I’m glad I did. I find it hilarious and extremely entertaining.

Cancer didn’t simply make me fear treatment, pain, and death. It reorganized my attention. It changed what felt emotionally authentic, what stories resonated with me, what subjects I could tolerate, and what felt honest. Reading When Breath Becomes Air in a hospital bed after major cancer surgery was not me indulging morbidity. It was me searching for understanding inside an experience that had stripped away many of the illusions I took for granted in life -- permanence, control, and the belief that life was guaranteed to remain recognizable.

* * * * *

A Torture Scene with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Last week I had a somewhat disturbing dream involving Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In the dream, Burton was being tortured by electroshocks. He was seated on a couch in which one cushion had been removed so that his body was on a metal plate. He was wearing a herringbone sport coat and semi-formal attire.  With limbs quivering, eyes ablaze with terror and fingers curled alongside his face, he looked like a terrified, helpless animal.  

On the far side of the room was a man in a lab coat fiddling with knobs like a studio engineer adjusting a soundboard.

Elizabeth Taylor, wearing an incongruous grin, was standing over her suffering prey looking triumphant. 

* * *

When I awoke, my first thought was about the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured a cruel, escalating  conflict between Taylor and Burton.

As I reflected further, a number of things came to mind, the first being: This was the not the purpose of bringing electricity into the world. One of electricity's benefits is light, electricity being a source of light in the world. It was not harnessed for the purpose of torturing people.

Looking into it further, I discovered that the Ancient Greeks noticed how rubbing amber produced static electricity. Ben Franklin linked electricity to lightning in 1752. Alessandro Volta created the first battery (1800), Michael Faraday later discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), enabling generation. Electricity exists in nature as electrons and charges; humans learned to harness it in the 18th–19th centuries.

What we see is that humans did not "create" electricity, they discovered it, and learned how to apply it.

In the late 19th century power lines began to appear. The first long-distance line was built to carry electricity between Williamette Falls and Portland, Oregon, a stretch of 13 miles. Within a matters of years high-voltage AC transmission enabled efficient delivery everywhere.

The advent of dedicated electric torture devices for interrogation appeared in the 1930s' The electric prod was purportedly first used by police in Argentina in 1932. Essentially it was a modified cattle prod that delivered high-voltage, low-amperage shocks to sensitive body areas for pain without killing its subjects.

Hand-cranked magneto/dynamo devices (from field telephones or car batteries) were used for shocks in various contexts by the 1940s, notably by French forces in colonial Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s, and in other places. 

The use of electricity for torture spread widely in the mid-20th century because it often leaves minimal visible marks, suiting regimes wishing to avoid scrutiny. It has since been documented in dozens of countries with devices like cattle prods, stun guns, and electrodes.

One of the shocking revelations of the Iraq War was our own use of electricity for torture and psychological coercion at Abu Ghraib prison. We denounced it as odious when Saddam Hussein was doing it, It's a shame our own nation dropped its own ethical standards in this pointless activity. We've been told all our lives that the ends don't justify the means. We also know that any information extracted by torture is unreliable. 

Sorry to be so depressing. 

"Man's inhumanity to man

makes countless thousands mourn."

--Robert Burns

If you're interested in learning about the history of electricity as a torture technology, click here.

 

Related Link

The National Stain Known as Gitmo

The Real Reason the U.S. Entered WWI: This Forgotten Telegram

Click to enlarge

Ask someone what brought America into World War I and chances are they will mention the Lusitania. The sinking of the British ocean liner in 1915 became one of the most powerful symbols of the war. "Remember the Lusitania" entered the public consciousness and remains there more than a century later.

Yet many historians argue that the Lusitania was not the decisive factor in bringing America into the conflict. That distinction belongs to a far less dramatic event: a coded telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico.

I first wrote about the Zimmermann Telegram in 2011. Most Americans have never heard of it. There were no torpedoes, no ships sunk, no tragic photographs of drowning civilians. There was only a message—intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence—proposing that if the United States entered the war against Germany, Mexico should join Germany and, in return, be offered the chance to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

When the contents became public in 1917, the political landscape shifted dramatically. The Zimmermann Telegram reminds us that history often turns on events that are invisible to the public at the time. The incidents we remember are not always the incidents that matter most. Which leads one to ask, what is really happening in the Middle East right now? Or closer to home for that matter?

* * *

During our year working at an orphanage in Mexico I learned a lot about our Southern neighbor and its history. At the time of the Zimmermann telegram, Mexico was in the midst of a ten year revolution, which culminated in the the country becoming a socialist state. 

During our 250 year history, Mexico underwent numerous revolutions. This last, and most significant, was the 1910 Mexican Revolution. To understand the political culture under the thirty year reign of Porfirio Diaz, think of the Plantation system of America's deep South, except things were even more lopsided. An estimated 800 to 1,000 wealthy families and foreign corporations owned roughly 97% of the country's cultivated land. This massive inequality—where millions of peasants were left landless—was the primary catalyst for Emiliano Zapata's revolutionary cry of “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty).

Related Links
The Zimmermann Telegram

The Last Days of Ambrose Bierce: Revisiting the Mystery

Brownsville Girl and The Old Gringo

The Boy in the Bubble: Our Perilous Postmodern Predicament (Revisited)

Each of us, whether conscious of it or not, lives inside a meta-narrative — a story that gives shape and meaning to our experience. These frameworks help us interpret suffering, progress, history, morality, identity, and hope itself. The songs we listen to, the books we read, the films we absorb, and the headlines that bombard us daily all reinforce or undermine these narratives.

The New World Encyclopedia defines a meta-narrative as: “A theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social or cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.”

For centuries, the dominant Judeo-Christian meta-narrative placed God at the center of human history. Life had meaning because history itself had meaning — a beginning, a moral structure, and an end toward which humanity was moving.

Modernism gradually displaced this framework. The new narrative suggested that humanity no longer needed transcendence. Progress itself became the faith. Science, technology, education, democracy, medicine, and human ingenuity would build a brighter tomorrow. The future became our secular heaven.

But as the twentieth century, these Utopian visions encountered the reality of world wars, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, gulags, terrorism and alienation. The collapse of trust and the realization that technological advancement does not necessarily produce moral advancement became self-evident.

From these ruins Postmodernism emerged. It questioned whether progress was ever truly progress at all. It distrusted grand narratives entirely and hope itself became suspect.

It is in this sense that "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon feels so prophetic.

Listening to the song again recently, I was struck by its architecture. The verses arrive like fragments from a newsfeed: terrorism, drought, celebrity spectacle, scientific breakthroughs, violence, medicine, wealth, and technological marvels. The modern world flashes before us in disconnected images.

-- A bomb in a baby carriage.
-- A baby with a baboon heart.
-- Lasers in the jungle.
-- These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And after each unsettling verse comes the refrain: “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”

But the reassurance feels hollow, which is the genius of the song. The Boy in the Bubble captures the emotional contradiction of late modernity — astonishing technological achievement paired with spiritual exhaustion and civilizational anxiety. The narrator seems convinced that technological wonder should somehow compensate for spiritual dislocation. Look at all we can do, he insists. Look at the miracles. Look at the progress.

Yet beneath the surface lies exhaustion and dread. The one being comforted appears to understand something the narrator cannot: human beings can surround themselves with spectacle and still feel abandoned. We can cure diseases, transplant organs, photograph distant galaxies, and instantaneously transmit information across the planet — yet remain spiritually adrift. The modern world increasingly resembles a giant illuminated carnival trembling atop a void. 

One thing that makes the song enduring is how it captures the emotional texture of postmodern life long before social media intensified it. Today we scroll endlessly through catastrophe, innovation, entertainment, outrage, tragedy, and distraction in one continuous stream. We are flooded with information yet starving for coherence.

Even the most amazing reels soon leave us bored. Nothing satisfies.

And what makes the song so incredibly pointed is that while the narrator doesn't see it, the one he's trying to comfort sees it perfectly. She's not only crying because of the brokenness of the world but because the one who seeks to comfort her is so oblivious to it. It's like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells the whole story, yet can't see that which is plain to everyone who hears his tale. Listen to this song several times and hear the painfulness in his appeal at the end of each verse. 

We reassure one another with the language of progress while quietly sensing that something essential has gone missing. Perhaps that is why the song still haunts listeners nearly forty years later. It understands that our crisis is not merely political or technological. It is metaphysical.

The Boy In The Bubble

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shopwindows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turnaround jump shot
It’s everybody jumpstart
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
a loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires, and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry

© 1986 Words and Music by Paul Simon and Forere Mothoeloa

The Pity of War and the Lusitania

Illustration by Norman Wilkinson (public domain)

"The first casualty of war is truth." --Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

This is a follow-up to my blog post earlier this month on the sinking of the Lusitania.

While The Pity of War is primarily about the larger strategic and political failures that produced World War I, Niall Ferguson does make mention of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania within the broader context of wartime propaganda and Britain’s effort to bring the United States into the conflict. This prompted me to want to add to what I wrote last Thursday.

The Lusitania episode became one of the defining propaganda triumphs of the Allied war effort. The ship was not simply an innocent passenger liner in the purest sense presented to the public at the time. The vessel was carrying war-related materiel, including rifle cartridges and shell components, a fact long minimized or obscured in wartime narratives.

Though Germany was not morally blameless, the event was immediately transformed into a powerful emotional symbol through British and Allied media. Images of drowned civilians, women, and children were used to shape public opinion—especially in America—toward viewing Germany as uniquely barbaric. Ferguson sees this as part of the modern evolution of mass persuasion during industrial warfare.

At the same time, we should all consider these uncomfortable questions:
--Why was ammunition placed aboard a civilian liner traveling through contested waters.
--Why were passengers insufficiently informed of the risks?
--To what degree did governments exploit tragedy to mobilize public sentiment?

Propaganda usually simplifies complex realities into moral absolutes, and WWI was no different. Ferguson is especially skeptical of the idea that Britain entered the war purely for noble reasons or that Allied information campaigns were straightforwardly truthful. 

Importantly, once the sinking occurred, it became highly effective as a political and psychological weapon. The incident helped prepare American opinion for eventual intervention, even though the U.S. did not formally enter the war until 1917, nearly two years later.

One of Ferguson’s recurring themes is that modern states during this war learned how to harness media, atrocity stories, emotional imagery, and selective truths to sustain large-scale conflict. In that sense, the Lusitania became not merely a maritime disaster, but an early case study in twentieth-century information warfare.

The Pity of War: Niall Ferguson Lays Blame at Britain's Doorstep Regarding WWI, the Great War

World War I reminds us how quickly nationalism, alliances, propaganda, and political miscalculation can pull nations into catastrophe. Leaders expected a short war; instead it became industrialized slaughter. The conflict also showed how media narratives and public emotion can overpower caution, creating momentum toward war before societies fully understand the consequences.

Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England’s fault. According to Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces.  

* * * 

I can't recall when I first began reading Niall Ferguson, the prominent Glasgow-born historian. One of his books, which I wrote about in 2021, was The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. His book answered one of the questions I have long pondered: How did Western Europe become such a global powerhouse? What were the foundation stones that contributed to the rise of the West? Here's my take on this book: Why Civilizations Fail: Niall Ferguson Sounds A Wake-Up Call.

You can tell from Ferguson's other titles that he's pessimistic about our future unless things change. His most recent title is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. Another of his books is Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. His aim, however, is not to get us depressed. It's intended to wake us up. We've become complacent.  

* * * * *

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

That the war was horrific and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and others, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, there were more British casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans killed in the Vietnam War over a period of ten years. (That battle alone took between 120,000 and 150,000 lives.) And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War is a pretty good guide through all that foul terrain. 

"The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history."
--Niall Ferguson

The Pity of War is a revisionist examination of the causes and consequences of World War I. Ferguson's contrarian position challenges many accepted assumptions, arguing that Britain’s entry into the war transformed what might have remained a continental conflict into a catastrophic global struggle. He contends that Britain may have been better off remaining neutral—an argument that runs against traditional narratives about moral necessity and national duty.

What makes the book compelling is Ferguson’s willingness to question sacred historical assumptions while backing his claims with extensive research, statistics, economic analysis, and firsthand accounts. Even readers who disagree with his conclusions will find the book intellectually stimulating because it forces a reconsideration of how wars begin, how governments justify intervention, and how myths become embedded in national memory.

One of the motivations for the writing of this book (and writing a book is such a massive project that you really do need a large dose of motivation) was that his grandfather was one of the soldiers who fought in that nightmare war, "which remains the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure." As a private in the 2nd Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders, part of the 26th Brigade in the 9th Divison of the British Expeditionary Force, Ferguson saw his grandfather's survival as "mysteriously fortunate."

At times the book can feel dense--and in my paperback version the font is too small--especially in its economic and diplomatic detail, but Ferguson's prose is easily digestible if  you keep going. He writes with confidence. The result is not merely a history of World War I, but a meditation on power, propaganda, nationalism, and unintended consequences. 

Was it "the greatest error of modern history" as Ferguson suggests. This book makes his case.

Tomorrow I aim to do a follow-up on the sinking of the Lusitania, from Niall Ferguson's perspective.

Related Links

WWI RELATED BLOG POSTS

Poilu.  https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/12/poilu-grisly-wwi-memoir-from-trenches.html

The Great War: So Much Sorrow 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-great-war-so-much-sorrow-and-for.html

The British Generals 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-british-generals-heading-into-world.html

Why did this assassination result in total war?

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2014/06/100-years-ago-today-why-did-this.html

A Book That Changed History: Guns of August

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/10/book-that-changed-history.html

Veteran’s Day and My Boy Jack

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2010/11/veterans-day-and-my-boy-jack.html

The Unnecessary War

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/06/unnecessary-war.html

The Sinking of the Lusitania Has Lessons for Today

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-sinking-of-lusitania-has-lessons.html

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2010/12/and-band-played-waltzing-matilda.html

A Poem by Siegrfried Sassoon for Memorial Day

Burying the dead at Somme (public domain)

World War I reminds us how quickly nationalism, alliances, propaganda, and political miscalculation can pull nations into catastrophe. Leaders expected a short war; instead it became industrialized slaughter. The conflict also showed how media narratives and public emotion can overpower caution, creating momentum toward war before societies fully understand the consequences.

The war produced many writers and poets of significance. Siegfried Sassoon was one of these, one of the more powerful poetic voices to emerge from the "War to End All Wars." Sassoon rejected the patriotic romanticism common in wartime verse, writing with brutal honesty about trench warfare, exposing its fear, suffering, and senseless waste. His poems often attacked the blindness of political and military leaders while expressing deep compassion for ordinary soldiers trapped in the nightmare of war.

To put Sassoon's writing in perspective, he was a Lieutenant at the Battle of Somme who witnessed this horror firsthand. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), 19,240 British soldiers were killed. This remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army. The total British casualties that day—including those who were wounded, captured, or went missing—reached 57,470.

During the Battle of the Somme (July–November 1916), the British and Imperial forces suffered approximately 420,000 casualties, of which historians estimate around 125,000 to 150,000 were fatalities. This is two to three times the number of Americans who died over a span of ten years in Vietnam.

Here is Siegfried Sassoon's poem Attack.

Attack

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun 

In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, 

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud 

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, 

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. 

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed 

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, 

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. 

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, 

They leave their trenches, going over the top, 

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, 

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, 

Flounders in mud. O Jesu, make it stop!

Copyright Credit: Siegfried Sassoon, “Attack” from Counter-attack: And Other Poems. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1918. Public domain.

Source: Counter-attack: And Other Poems (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1918)