Paul's Heart

An Elephant In The Room

As I am proofreading my book, now finished, I am reflecting on the many things that I wrote about. One of the things that is definitely one of the greatest things that I have witnessed over my four decades of cancer survivorship, is progress; progress in diagnostic methods, progress in treatment options, and progress in following up patients after cancer.

But we still lack an ability to talk about cancer with those closest to us, especially our significant others. Or, when it comes to beginning a relationship, when is the “right time” to bring up that you had cancer? Thirty-five years ago, when I was diagnosed, and beyond, we never heard of people beating cancer. If you heard the word cancer, it was because someone famous had died. And it was even rare to hear of a family member dying from cancer back then, because no one talked about it. There was a stigma of cancer being contagious, which of course was not true. And this was before social media. Poor choice of words, but the only reason cancer was thought to be “contagious,” was the contagion of rumors. Up until the turn of the century, it is likely that many cancer patients were treated as if they were contagious, or at least people thought cancer was contagious.

It was actually a social media post that came across my feed recently that provoked this post. It was written by a young woman, married, with several children. She had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma recently, and is about to undergo chemotherapy, which cocktail I am unaware and really does not matter for this post. Clearly she was looking for serious answers as she prefaced her question with a reference to “being adults.” She was not looking for cat calls or unsolicited flirting.

She was trying to gather consensus among other patients and survivors, on the risks of intimacy, from kissing to full sexual relations. As I had previously said, sex was the furthest from either my wife’s or my mind. And honestly, I do not recall any level of intimacy such as kissing, again, because of the whole “fear of contagiousness.” All I had been told once my chemo was done, when I asked how soon, we could pursue having children, I had been told to wait a year or two. In all honesty, while I was going through treatments, radiation or chemo, I really was not thinking about sex, although had I been presented with an opportunity, I would have had to have been a gentleman. Alas, the issue never came up. The rest you have to read in the book.

The author of the post ended up getting a variety of answers, and as per her request, reasonable responses. But they ranged from not being told anything, to refraining two to three days, or as many as seven. Any who had been given any kind of warnings, did say it referred to any form of body fluid exchange, which would not only have included kissing or intercourse, but any opportunity of exposure, which could include sweat, or sharing a glass or utensil with food. If there were intercourse, there did need to be a condom used.

The argument was, that the chemo drugs are believed to remain in the blood system for days following the infusion, and thereby could be released through bodily fluids. And this is a possibility. This is a far cry from my younger days when the concern was more towards catching cancer.