I remember as a child (mid 60s) hearing my 75-year-old grandmother point at a man who had lost a leg, saying that it had been due to something called “cancer.” I asked her what it was, but I don’t recall what she said. I do remember her saying “And if you mess with it [cancer], it just gets bigger and bigger.” I think that was common thinking back that, that “once it hits the air, it starts spreading.”
Anyway, as a child I knew that cancer, whatever it was, could get bigger, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that I found out that not only that—but it could sprout “roots” that would start burrowing into other surrounding tissue, organs, etc.
It was probably not until the mid-80s (when I was in my mid-20s) that I learned of the metastatic “seed and soil” nature of cancerous tumors from a newspaper article. That’s when I realized what made cancerous tumors so deadly. I don’t recall the concept of metastasis being included in TV medical dramas, either, until maybe “ER.”
How ‘bout it? When did you learn about it?
Huh. When I was a teenager, I picked up a second-hand copy of Histological Typing of Soft-Tissue Tumours, the bulk of which was made up of colour plates of spectacular microscopic photography. (I liked the contrast between the beauty of the images and their grim captions.)
Those captions contained the word “metastasized” frequently enough that I looked it up to see exactly what it meant. That was twenty years ago.
I was heavily into Reader’s Digest by about age 8, so I got fairly well-informed by such articles as “I am Joe’s neoplasm” and the like.
When I was six or seven. It’s what caused my grandmother’s death a couple of months after my seventh birthday.
Of course an explaination to a kid that young goes like “You know that Grammy had cancer since before you were born, though it went away for a while and she got better. The cancer she had when Mommy was in high school is why she only had one breast and why she had the fake one to go in her bra. That’s where the cancer started so they had to take it off so they could try to make the cancer go away. When it came back again it spread to other parts of her body and the doctors couldn’t cure her this time.”
I think I knew fairly young that cancer could spread, but I don’t think I understood what cancer really was (your own cells growing and dividing out of control), until sometime in my 20’s.
Of course, I got my own unnervingly in-depth look at cancer treatment when I was 31 and got told that the lump in my knee wasn’t a cyst like the previous doctor thought it was. In that case, the particular cancer I had was most likely to spread to my lungs (it hadn’t), and now when I go in for checkups they give me a chest X-ray every time but don’t even bother giving my knee any more than a “look and feel” inspection.