Viewing Cancer Tangibly

Viewing Cancer Tangibly

By Sahana Pathak

On the first day of my internship at a pathology lab, I was given a basic tour of the research facility. While I was fascinated by the amount of effort that went into creating such small slides, I can’t say that the first day was remarkably evocative. 

Pathology labs have little to no direct patient interaction, which I thought was perfect; I was always a sensitive child. Seeing even an advertisement on TV involving some sort of terminal patient would make me tear up. I care too much to not choose a career that directly affects patients around the globe, but I also care too much to be as impartial as the professionals who treat them. 

We often treat cancer as an invisible monster, as if it is only possible to see the havoc it wreaks, but not the monster itself.  Even with my extensive, albeit textbook, knowledge, I imagined cancer as this tiny clump of cells that weren’t visible to the naked eye, and even when tumors were visible, I imagined they were not as prominent as we would expect from a disease of this degree. All these factors combined are what made my experience on the second day so jarring. 

I was called into the room where they cut biopsies and preserved them. Before entering, I received a rudimentary explanation about how there were different ‘margins’ marked on the lump of tissue in different colors to show the borders of the tumor, or how far it spread. It was the pathology lab’s job to check if the tumor had spread past any of its margins, and if another operation would be required. I stood silently in an apron that felt wrong to be wearing after seeing it on so many knowledgeable professionals, and I held my hands tightly behind my back, trying to occupy as little space as possible in the already tiny room. I stared at the head of the lab as she took down measurements from a lump of tissue. After a few minutes, she turned around and cheerfully motioned me closer.

“So this is breast tissue, and if I lift this flap, you should be able to see a patch of abnormal tissue. Are you seeing it? Yes, that’s the tumor.”

I still can’t figure out what it was about that moment that elicited such a diverse amalgamation of emotions from me. Perhaps it was the fact that there was a physical tumor in front of me, staining healthy pink tissues a dark black, similar to the color we would usually associate with death. Or perhaps it was the fact that the tissue in front of me was a breast, something I could not fathom depersonalizing.

Images ran through my head of the kind of strong, brave woman it might have belonged to. It could have been my second-grade teacher who wore bright blue eyeliner, or the perky radio host whose voice I heard every time I entered the car. It could have been one of my grandmother’s friends who loved to play carrom, or maybe it was a girl who had just entered adolescence. 

While there was fear in my mixture of emotions, there was also this profound realization of how safely ensconced I was within my own bubble of thoughts. This experience was beyond eye-opening for me. Cancer is scary, especially when it’s physically in front of you. But it’s there it’s real. And it’s not the invisible monster I alluded to, but a real thing that can irrevocably destroy the lives of real people around the world.

Let this be a reminder: cancer exists. As terrifying as it may be, you have to find the confidence to acknowledge it. Fear can be forgiven, ignorance can’t.