Exercise Gave Me Control. It Didn’t Cure My Cancer

Visit almost anywhere on the internet that serves people diagnosed with cancer and you will find information about exercising. It wasn’t always this way. Not too long ago, most doctors and patients seemed to believe that exercise was an impossibility. Though I wasn’t diagnosed at that time, I think that was probably driven by multiple reasons and not just because people didn’t know better. Treatment drugs were mostly systemic chemotherapy, there was either less understanding of side effects or fewer known medications to prevent or treat them, and of course there was also a mindset that figured rest and quiet was the only way through, especially for women.

Finding Exercise After My Diagnosis

When I was newly diagnosed with metastatic cancer back in 2015, I didn’t go looking for information about exercise. I came across it through a basic online search that reveals my panic: How can I live longer with metastatic breast cancer? I found a lot of depressing statistics, especially for someone with pre-teen and teen kids who I wanted to live to see grow up.

Buried in there was a preliminary mouse study from Sweden that found in mice that treadmill exercise increased the efficacy of a breast cancer treatment drug.

I can’t say if I would give the same weight to that study today, but at the time it offered the only thing providing the smallest smidgen of control over what lay ahead. I dusted off my own treadmill and began to use it several times a week.

It did not cure me—I give credit for my still out-of-the-norm survival to the drugs Taxol, trastuzumab and pertuzumab and my oncologist’s unwavering focus on extending my life—and it is impossible to say if it improved the drugs’ effectiveness, but it did do the thing I desperately needed.

Getting on that treadmill gave me a sense of active involvement in my care.

Exercise Can Be Helpful Without Being a Cure

Now, when I go on social media, I get a lot of videos talking about exercise and cancer in general. Even today, there is relatively little research specifically directed to people with metastatic cancer.

I believe the research that indicates it is beneficial to exercise.

What I don’t like are the too-frequent implications, in some of the testimonials and always in the comments, that the reason people 1) get cancer is because they didn’t exercise, 2) suffer with treatments is because they don’t exercise, and 3) die from cancer is because they didn’t exercise.

Exercise Should Never Become a Source of Blame

None of these things are true. None.

Why someone gets a cancer diagnosis is usually a mix of things out of their control and unknown; side effect severity is also a function of multiple factors; dying from cancer is so horribly and heartbreakingly common that it is absurd to suggest exercise could have prevented it.

Those of us with a cancer diagnosis, and probably even more so in those with a metastatic diagnosis, do enough self-blaming and self-shaming.

For myself, I listen and I judge the value of what I hear and read about exercise and cancer. I go deeper whenever possible and try to find the supporting research to read it for myself. I know what exercise has done for me, and I know how it did not change the outcome for far too many friends.

Cancer Is Complicated

Cancer is complicated. Living with cancer is complicated. You do what you need to do to feel better and to maybe live longer.

If exercise is a tool for you, please don’t use it to shame others.

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