A Lion in the House

If you'd like to know one of the reasons why I'm riding in the Pan Mass Challenge, there's a documentary now showing on PBS that you should watch. It's called A Lion in the House.

There's no shortage of stories in the media about cancer. Unfortunately, most of it is crap. Brief features on TV news magazines tout the latest miracle developments and fads, but these are premature, unsubstantiated, and often downright misleading. Newspaper stories and talk-shows feature interviews with cancer survivors, usually emphasizing the upbeat (they're alive and a valuable member of the community) and omitting the downers (the illness, the hospitalization, and the fact that many do not recover).

And don't get me started on movies! 99% of movies slavishly follow this plot. A person, maybe too busy with work or some other distraction, contracts a serious disease. After some moderate inconveniences of illness (such as shouting at unsympathetic doctors and health care bureacrats), they re-evaluate their life and become a better person. It's very uplifting and leaves the audience satisified. Except the hero rarely ever loses their good looks, much less their hair, or suffers skin rashes, or debilitating and embarassing breakdowns of bodily functions. That would be too much of a downer. Why would people watch that?

The documentary A Lion in the House follows the stories of several children undergoing cancer treatment at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The filmmakers were granted extraordinarily intimate access in the conversations between the kids, their parents, doctors and nurses. Some of the kids barely understand what's happening to them. They hurt all over and wonder why their parents can't do anything. The parents are by turns heroic, smart, worried, enraged, delusional. The doctors and especially the nurses are brusque and compassionate, arrogant and practical, stoic and humbled. In other words, everybody is a human being.

Jean and I watched these programs. We recognized so much of our own experience. Probing doctors and patient nurses. Being woken every couple of hours for checkups. Pain. Tedium. Confusion. No definitive answers. Anxious waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

A fun night of TV viewing, no? It's actually quite gripping and moving. Real life is infinitely more interesting and bracing than tired melodrama. We all need a splash of cold, clean water to wake us up and remind us, "This is what really happens."

I'm riding in the Pan Mass Challenge, which raises money for cancer research at the Dana Farber Institute, particularly for research in childhood cancers. I wish they were doing more research on Jean's appendiceal cancer, and that's one of the reasons why I'm riding. Watching A Lion in the House reminds me of many other reasons.

A Lion in the House is now showing on local PBS stations. To find out more information, visit the program's website at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/lioninthehouse/index.htm.