The Trouble with (Blood Cancer) Muggles
It’s Blood Cancer Awareness Month again.
And once again, I have mixed feelings about it. I am pretty aware of my own blood cancer, thank you very much. I think about it a lot.
I have to remind myself of who this month is really for:
Cancer Muggles.
So what is a cancer muggle?
If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you know what a “muggle” is. It’s the term for someone who does not have wizard powers. Regular people. They tend to be afraid of wizards, and they certainly don’t understand them.
I know some AYA (Adolescent/Young Adult) cancer advocates who use the term “Cancer Muggle” (a term that I really like). That’s someone who doesn’t have cancer, has never had cancer, and just doesn’t understand the experience. Cancer Muggles are prone to saying things that are hurtful or misguided, often (but not always) without realizing the effect their words have on a cancer patient or survivor.
We all have stories of people saying the wrong thing to us. You can find some of the stories of them here on Blood-Cancer.com. In 12+ years with follicular lymphoma, I thought I’d heard them all. But then a few weeks ago, in an online group for other FL patients, someone told a story of being accused of faking her cancer. (This happens fairly frequently with slow-growing cancers like FL, where we can go without symptoms for months or even years.) This person’s “friend” didn’t believe she had cancer because she “didn’t walk like a cancer patient.”
(Yeah, I’m not sure what that means, either.)
How to deal with muggles
Many of us have developed strategies for dealing with the insensitive things people say to us. The wizarding world offers some advice, too.
There’s Muggle-Baiting. This is a kind of pranking. A wizard might give a Muggle some shrinking keys, so the Muggle is always losing them. I guess we can use this with Cancer Muggles by “playing the cancer card” when it isn’t necessary. (My mom, a month out from chemo for ovarian cancer, tried to do this once to get free sprinkles on her ice cream). I don’t usually encourage the “cancer card” strategy, but if it fends off a Cancer Muggle attack, then I say go for it.
Then there’s memory-erasing. Sometimes a Muggle sees a wizard do magic, which is bad. There are special charms that can be used to erase a Muggle’s memory so they forget they ever saw anything magical. The easiest way to use this with a Cancer Muggle is to just change the subject. That’s easier said than done sometimes, but I have found that Cancer Muggles are often easily distracted when you turn the subject back to themselves.
The ultimate spell
Of course, sometimes a Cancer Muggle can’t be distracted or pranked, or made to think differently about you or your blood cancer. Maybe, for example, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t convince them that you really do walk like a cancer patient.
In that case, you might need to break out the big stuff: the vanishing spell. Just say the magic word: Evanesco.
It’s one of the hardest spells for wizard students to learn. And it’s one of the hardest things for a cancer patient to do: cut someone out of your life completely. Make them disappear.
But we have enough to deal with. There’s no point in keeping someone around who just makes it harder. Our mental health is as important as our physical health, and if a Cancer Muggle is making that difficult, then maybe the best thing to do is walk away.
Like a cancer patient.
(Whatever that means.)
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