Sponsored Smoke For Cancer Charities

Miscellaneous

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Leeds Writer Mick McCann explains why he’s doing a Sponsored Smoke For Cancer Charities…

I’ve launched a sponsored smoke for cancer charities in memory of Vicky Jackson, my wife.

I’m not a widower, I’m still married, our choice. With my family, she was the most important person in my life.

VickyVeranda

The response so far has been startling (Links to Twitter responses are below the post – far too many to insert inside. Ed)

It seems Vicky had observations that many have felt but thought they were not allowed to say.

N.B. The campaign does not advocate smoking.

The campaign has been tagged – after most of the flurry of first tweets had ended… I am daft – the #VickyManifesto.

Vicky was a smoker who died in June from non-smoking related cancer. She loved the sponsored smoke idea, it made her chuckle at the naughtiness. For me, that’s reason enough to do it in her memory but there’s so much more.

The main aims are to highlight some of the things that really pissed Vicky off about social reactions to her non-smoking related cancer and to raise a bit of cash for a charity. I cannot name the charity as no charity could be associated with one of my mad schemes.

I’m a great believer in the expression, that from acorns them right big plants, what kids used to climb up, grow. I may only reach 2,000 people but Vicky’s words will have sown thoughts and ideas in our heads and we will feel emboldened to question behaviour.

Although society tried to insist, Vicky didn’t want to be defined by her cancer. She was, until her very last breath, way more than a disease.

The Armley Press website gives the #VickyManifesto in full, so I’m just gonna babble about life and that and try weave in the odd bit of info, background and reflect on peoples’ responses so far.

HEALTH WARNING: I’m currently writing like a bastard and I can’t step out of my current, phoney street, wittering writing style and provide you with a dry pseudo journo précis. It’d be too dangerous to my only talent, talking bollocks, which is currently flourishing…

The subject isn’t dry for me, it’s well wet. When alone, fluids are, randomly and without warning, gushing from my face – it’s like contractions. We don’t tend to cry in groups, all the people who love Vicky (except the kids) try not to cry in front of me and I do the same.

We posted the blog on Thursday night and it has had some heart-warming reactions. In response to @WLDispatch West Leeds Dispatch: One of the most thought provoking things we’ve read in a long while. Please support… One of my authors, Nathan O’Hagan, said @MickMcCann01 seems to have struck a chord with his sponsored charity smokeathon. And that’s how it feels, that Vicky’s experiences of cancer mirrored many other peoples and with different diseases.

I dint see these positives coming. In planning it, I was concentrating on if it might upset people as I’m calling them out, forcefully questioning our behaviours as individuals and a society. I rested on my own worked-through certainty. Upon inspection, the certain was a question with only one answer.

My friends will tell you – drives ‘em crackers – that sometimes I decide on a topic and there’s simply right and wrong.‘You can look for the grey areas if it makes you feel better but here, they are simply irrelevant. Promise y’ I’m right, I’ve thought it through and everything.’

The question about peoples’ feelings and the blog was simple… ‘I’m reporting the feelings of someone I love beyond words and the various ways that society dumped shit on her cancerous last years. Who’s feelings, Mick, in your little world, could possibly matter more than Vicky’s?… Now get y balls out for the lads… and de-dums, y might hurt people’s feelings.’

Are the feelings of wider society more important than the feelings of those with a life threatening disease?

Maybe it was just Vicky? Nah, I completely got what upset her – she was simply right. If me ’n’ Vic help one other person, made to feel how she did, it’ll be worth it. I’ve since been told by many people that they shared Vicky’s upset and it covered all the different points. They were relieved and excited to hear somebody articulate them.

Society sometimes chucks out shite, it’s what we do. Same as our bodies, we’re human. Trick is, spotting the shite and saying ‘Big deep hole, that’s where that lives. Not close up in my life, not where I sleep or eat.’

Problem is, sometimes societies and individuals embrace their shit, or simply allow it to be in the wrong place: apartheid, child labour (complex issue), a woman, right now, having a limb amputated in Aleppo with paracetamol as her only pain relief, the treatment of the Kurdish people for the last century – the list is endless. If you ever see me stinking and covered in shit, please tell me and ignore my sensitivities, ‘Mick y’ stink’a shit.’ Would work for me.

The next points are detailed in the manifesto, so I’ll be brief.

The online environment caused Vicky much pain and stress. Including the architecture of it, cancer charity ‘campaigns’ and the behaviour of some of the people in it. She was not alone.

@elainewalton: All of this, all day long. Esp the cancer charities and vanity FB posts.

@JayMeW: I also lost friends for calling out the no makeup selfie (mum also felt exactly the same as Vicky) and was told to stop being over sensitive and that she should stay away from Facebook for a while if it upset her ?????)

Yep Jay’s mum, cancer patients should be denied Facebook access and from seeing how their kids/mates are doing on holiday or pictures of their new Grandchild/friends baby cos some vain women want to post pics of themselves and pretend to care and raise money, without actually doing either – I’d guess inmost, no make-up selfie, cases.

My headline in the #VickyManifesto for the vicious, professional cancer industry sales people is:

The Cruel Cancer Charities and Being Chased by Morally Sick Women in Pink Bras.

People have responded with more extreme examples than those I use in the manifesto. I’m conscious of space, readers’ ability to concentrate in our sound bite world and fancy a proper, fully expressed rant, 😉 about something utterly crucial, so read it at Armley Press if you’re interested. I’m moving on and I’ll leave that pile of warm crap to Lord Grade.

With regard to serious illness, one such current piece of steaming fresh shit clutching the heart of our society is positive thinking. It’s many things, including cruel and utter bollocks.

Stress Vs Positive Thinking – Winning The Fight

@elainewalton: My Dad (30 days from diag to death) obvs didn’t fight hard enough. I hate all those war analogies with cancer.

The commercially driven, positive thinking myth has chinned the factual effects of stress on early on-set cancer and that’s really fucking sad. And had it been a fight, let me tell y, Vicky would have won, not on points but by a clean knock-out, in the first round.

Along with a donation my mate Boff Whalley said: Brilliant idea and linked to a review of a book called Smile Or Die which expands on Vicky’s feelings towards the language of positive thinking and debunks the multi-billion-dollar industry.

That positive thinking is utter bollocks is quite sad; we want it to be true. We want to believe we can affect it, that we can chin nature to some extent. We don’t want to believe that sometimes we are utterly helpless and then – ’cos the commercial world is there to serve AND exploit us – we spread negative, exploitative bullshit that heaps pressure on the terminally ill. We don’t question it ’cos it feels intuitively right, and our loved ones protect us by not saying, ‘Yeh, yeh and after the chemo I can swim the channel, pulling a small child….. Let’s face it, I’m going to die.’ Positive thinking is also used as social control, keeping us in our place, but that’s for another time.

Few people seem aware of the massive impact that stress can have on an early on-set cancer patient and most seem to believe in the power of positive thinking. That is a social crime cos stress is something we can influence and positive thinking is an illusion and the worst kind of bad trip.

In modern lifestyle societies, chronic stress has been associated with the pathogenesis of many diseases, including cancer. Chronic stress results in the activation of specific signalling pathways in cancer cells and the tumour microenvironment, leading to tumour growth and progression.
(Future Oncology. 2010 Dec; 6 (12): 1863–1881.)

As one human being to another, relieving another person’s stress can only be a good thing, surely. Int that one of those things where I piss people off by saying, ‘No, there’s right and wrong, all the rest is just the noise surrounding it? I know it… f’ sure.’

Other than medical treatment, advice and perhaps ghanja, relieving stress during early on-set cancer looks to be the ONLY practical thing we can do but I’m well open to other suggestions. Employers have a huge responsibility here that Vicky’s employees failed miserably in. They did the opposite and it din’t help.

If this stress factor was more widely known we may actually lengthen or save the life of our loved one but instead we bury our heads in the murderous sand of a re-assuring social myth too commercially valuable to have questioned. The saddest thing is we may then make the patient feel like they didn’t do enough, that their lack of some bullshit will power was, to some extent, connected to them notwinning the battle, not being brave enough. Compounding our social sins, we also deny their ability to curse and swear at their cancer (or ANY serious illness). We take away our loved ones ability to mourn their own death or simply get angry with the disease. But hey, that’s better for all concerned… yeh?

I’d sometimes say to Vicky, ‘I fucking hate it y’know, cancer’ and we’d hold hands or hug or gently cry and get cross or sad. Sounds daft in today’s positive thinking climate but I think it helped both of us. We should dump positive thinking, bravery, being strong, winning the battle and give that space to the terminally ill to tell us how they’re actually feeling. Do us all a lot of good.

The most important thing Vicky’s death underlined is that I doubt people understand just how precious time, or that lost loving moment, is until they’ve lost the centre of their world. We should mourn wasted time bitching and bickering that could’ve been used smiling contentedly with a head on a chest. Appreciate those you reckon y’ love and show ’em it right now and try to maintain that positive love because one day they will be gone.

I know I’m from Leeds, Yorkshire, England and shunt talk like a pussy, but it’s the truth.

MickSmoking

(Here’s a few reactions to Mick’s original post.)

Steve Bearne
Your “Sponsored Smoke” blog was an inspirational piece of writing.

Anonymous
I like this. Have ten pounds.

JoJo
Fab campaign, support you 100%. My best mate died a year ago on Thursday from breast cancer. Read your piece about the pink bra campaign at LBA & agreed totally. There’s no escape & there should b

Anonymous
Raising these issues as you do so well will help other people and their families live more comfortably, I’m sure, which will be a great legacy for Vicky to leave. Best wishes

Sai
Nice one Mick – shine a lighter