In his hit Live Like You Were Dying, Tim McGraw sang about a terminal cancer patient who whole-heartedly jumps into all the pursuits he never took the time for before, like sky diving, mountain climbing and bull riding.
In Showtime’s smart, funny The Big C, premiering Monday at 10:30 p.m., terminal cancer patient Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) just wants a pool.
At least at first. Bucket lists are not one-size-fits-all.
Cancer seems an unlikely topic for a comedy, but leave it to Showtime, currently culling laughs from an adulterous, pain killer-addicted nurse (Nurse Jackie) and a suburban mother and pot dealer (Weeds).
Cathy, before we meet her, was a sweet, mild-mannered teacher, wife and mother in perfect control of her beautiful suburban home, but not her man-child husband (Oliver Platt), her horrifyingly bratty teen son (Gabriel Basso) or her self-righteous Dumpster-diving brother (John Benjamin Hickey).
But after being diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, she begins feeling her way through both the finality of her condition and what she’s going to do with the rest of her life, that life that’s going to be so much shorter than she’d imagined.
While Cathy’s story is framed by death, the emotions invoked by a cancer diagnosis can be just as strong when, thankfully, the news is better.
A melanoma diagnosis, according to Tameka Peay, executive director of West Palm Beach’s Richard David Kann Melanoma Foundation, invites frustration, because "it can be prevented, 99 percent of the time. One in three people in Florida get (some form of) skin cancer. It’s very prevalent here."
Maruchy LaChance’s first reaction to her diagnosis last year was surprise. Being olive-skinned and of Cuban descent, she always assumed that "I would dodge" skin cancer because "I was not in that group that gets it. I laid out – I never did the baby oil thing, but I wasn’t careful. I thought, ‘I’m not Irish. I don’t need sunscreen.’ "
So when a white spot on her face turned out to be basal cell, the 46-year-old from Jupiter went from shock to being "kinda perturbed" that she had never been educated about the risks of skin cancer for people of color, and that her condition was "something so preventable. It frustrated me that this is something I could have done something about."
So her anger, like Cathy’s, spurred her to action. She decided to make her condition a teachable moment, letting her niece photograph her procedure in the dermatologist office, and then posting the photos, some of them slightly queasy-making, on Facebook.
Sunscreen is routine
"When people talk about skin cancer, I want them to see that this is what’s gonna happen," says LaChance, a runner who now makes 70 SPF sunscreen part of her routine. "Sometimes it doesn’t compute for people until you see a picture of ‘after.’ I still enjoy my time in the sun. I’m just more careful."
Steve Corson’s melanoma diagnosis also made him a zealot about sun safety, although he admits that he had more reason to be careful.
"I’m descended from all the pasty white people from Northern Europe – English, Irish, German. I have fair skin and blue eyes, and I’m just not supposed to be in the sun. Never was," says the 43-year-old, who nevertheless began soaking up the sun from the time he and his family moved to Florida from the Midwest while in middle school. "I had no regard for sun safety," he said. "I liked to have a tan, even though it’s not in my makeup."
The West Palm resident now bears the scars, literally, from all that fun in the sun – one each from the two surgeries he had to treat melanoma, both caught in Stage 1. Although he started going to a dermatologist regularly a decade ago, "when we did biopsies, the things had all come back (diagnosed) as noncancerous or precancerous. But about four or five years ago, I remember, it was a Tuesday, and the doctor called and said ‘You need to come in on Thursday,’ " Corson says. "Twenty-five, 30 years ago, we didn’t know what the real effect of the sun was, but what we know now is pretty scary."
Take precautions
While no cancer is completely preventable – there is some evidence that the chance of getting melanoma runs in families, according to Dr. John Kinney, a local dermatologist – there are so many ways to try to avoid it, ones that we all know:
Sun damage is cumulative, and getting just or two bad sunburns can be a precursor for cancer. Wear sun protection, including clothing and sunscreen. Wear a hat. Limit your exposure to direct sunlight, particularly the midday sun, when UV levels are highest. Avoid tanning beds. Get checked.
"I think the thing that is frightening is the relative increase in the number of cases," says Kinney. "Ten years ago, that number was half of what it is. The number of incidences is rising, and we don’t know why. It’s treatable if caught early. But you don’t want to be in that boat in the first place."
Although Kinney hasn’t seen the pilot of The Big C, he hopes that there’s a teachable moment in there.
"I hope there’s a part where she and her brothers and sisters all meet at the dermatologist’s office – and then all take their clothes off and get checked."
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