SS: Talk to any cancer patient and they’ll tell you: they don’t get to pick their own vocabulary. The disease assigns it. If you have a tumor in your bone, you learn to talk about scans and margins and what the pathologist found when they cut it out. If you have a cancer in your blood, you learn to talk about a number, because the number is the disease, and somebody draws it out of your arm every few weeks until you know it by heart.It’s a tell, and it’s almost impossible to fake, because nobody would think to try.
Natalie Harp has spent seven years saying she had bone cancer. Natalie Harp’s own words describe a blood disorder, not bone cancer. But still, she has said it on Fox News, at the Republican National Convention, and to the President of the United States. Twice now, in public, she has talked like someone with the other kind. And as you’d expect, Natalie Harp’s cancer story got worse every time she told it. As it goes with unwell, unstable people vying for the attention of another mentally unstable person, Natalie Harp told four versions of the same illness.
Sources include the Washington Post, Snopes, the Telegraph and the Daily Beast, plus a piece in the oncology outlet OncoDaily that raised the blood-disorder question I built this on.
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SS: Talk to any cancer patient and they’ll tell you: they don’t get to pick their own vocabulary. The disease assigns it. If you have a tumor in your bone, you learn to talk about scans and margins and what the pathologist found when they cut it out. If you have a cancer in your blood, you learn to talk about a number, because the number is the disease, and somebody draws it out of your arm every few weeks until you know it by heart.It’s a tell, and it’s almost impossible to fake, because nobody would think to try.
Natalie Harp has spent seven years saying she had bone cancer. Natalie Harp’s own words describe a blood disorder, not bone cancer. But still, she has said it on Fox News, at the Republican National Convention, and to the President of the United States. Twice now, in public, she has talked like someone with the other kind. And as you’d expect, Natalie Harp’s cancer story got worse every time she told it. As it goes with unwell, unstable people vying for the attention of another mentally unstable person, Natalie Harp told four versions of the same illness.
Sources include the Washington Post, Snopes, the Telegraph and the Daily Beast, plus a piece in the oncology outlet OncoDaily that raised the blood-disorder question I built this on.