If I missed a game, that meant I was losing the battle. I'm not going to let leukemia affect me.
The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical.
I'm battling cancer. It's another battle I intend to win.
People saw me as being heroic, but I was no more heroic than I was with other injuries I had, like the lacerated kidney I suffered during the 1990 World Series. It's just that people haven't known anyone with a lacerated kidney, but everyone can relate to someone with cancer.
So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.
Even if you have a terminal disease, you don't have to sit down and mope. Enjoy life and challenge the illness that you have.
It may look like the difficulty is going to defeat you. But you need to keep telling yourself, "This sickness can't take my life." "This cancer can't defeat me." "No bad break, no disappointment, no accident can shorten one second of my divine destiny."
Educate yourself. Understand what you're dealing with. Then figure out how to fight it. Then figure out how to raise money for that fight. It'll help you cope. It'll help your child.
[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.
I don't find anything upsetting or gross or degrading about fighting with a mental illness: Bipolar or Schizophrenia.
One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.'
