(CNN)When news of Senator John McCain's brain cancer diagnosis hit the internet, I thought it was beautiful to see so many well-wishers tweet to him with messages of support.
President Barack Obama tweeted: "Cancer doesn't know what it's up against. Give it hell, John." Rep. Steve Scalise, still recovering from surgeries to treat his gunshot wound, said: "Praying for my friend @SenJohnMcCain, one of the toughest people I know."
I'm a cancer survivor, and since the day of my own diagnosis, it felt strange to hear it myself.
"You'll beat this."
"You got this."
"You'll win this battle."
"Cancer isn't as tough as you."
"You'll be fine."
Strangers and friends who loved me said some of these things too. I knew they meant well. Like them, I grew up hearing cancer described as combat, something you "beat" if you've got enough "fight" in you. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer when I was a baby. Military metaphors were familiar, but they stopped making sense when the war was me. My own body.
Cancer, I soon learned, is my own cells going rogue. Suddenly all the combat language was confusing. Am I the invading army or the battleground? Am I the soldier or a hostage the soldier's trying to liberate? All of the above? If the chemotherapy and radiation and surgery and drugs don't work, and I die, will people be disappointed in me for not "fighting" hard enough?
For me, cancer never felt like a war. Cancer wasn't something I "had," but a process my body was going through. Brutal but effective medical treatment paused that process, as far as I know today. By the grace of science and God, I'm alive with no evidence of active disease as I share these words. It's as close to "cured" or "winning" as I get, one day at a time. And I'll take it, with gratitude.
Writers before me like Susan Sontag and Barbara Ehrenreich lived with breast cancer (and Sontag died from it), and both wrote about the dissonance of war metaphors in describing our disease. In war, we are taught, there are winners and losers. When breast cancer, a disease for which there is no known cure, progresses to our lymph nodes and shuts down our organs, have we as fighters failed?
There's no one right thing to say when someone gets diagnosed with cancer. Even if there were, nobody elected me to be the cancer vocabulary police.
I am no warrior. I just showed up to my medical appointments, did what I was told, and lived as best I could. Now, I try to avoid saying things to other cancer patients that imply I expect a certain outcome for them, or that I expect them to feel or behave in a particular way. "Try to think positive!" isn't always reasonable or possible, and I don't want to make a fellow patient feel bad by commanding them to feel one thing or another.
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