It’s Cancer

Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

Ben Shaw:
It, uh, presented as just, uh, what I thought was a standard toothache, uh, uh, left hand side on the bottom. And so I went to the dentist and they looked at it and thought it looked a bit more serious and a bit beyond their remit. So then they decided that they’d refer me on to a hospital not far from us, and after waiting for six weeks to hear back from the hospital, nothing happened. Then I got in contact with their dentist and they were a bit puzzled, but then they told me the paperwork had got stuffed up. So, the whole procedure had to begin again, so another six weeks, had to wait another six weeks. In the meantime, it got worse.

Studio – John Dickson:

You’re listening to Ben Shaw, and this is maybe one of the strangest, most difficult interviews I’ve ever done. He’s a minister of religion, an amazing musician and one of my oldest mates. He was the lead guitarist of the band that I sang for for years, In the Silence.

And he’s reliving some of the most painful and upsetting moments of his life. The day he heard two words, that make all the difference.

“It’s cancer.”

In this episode, we’re delving into that frightening world. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is the second leading cause of death internationally, accounting for an estimated 9.6 million fatalities in 2018 alone. That’s one in six deaths.

But cancer isn’t just a medical battleground. It’s a spiritual one as well.

Through the ages, myriad human voices have cried out, “My God, why?”

I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Studio – John Dickson:

Cancer is an undiscriminating disease. It can appear in almost any part of the body and in any age group. Each year, 300,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed in children alone. Friends of ours from church recently lost their beautiful five-year-old daughter to cancer. I dedicate this episode to them.

Cancer afflicts every country on earth. The poorest, of course, suffer the most because they can’t afford the high costs associated with prevention or treatment. And the costs for those who can pay are staggering. Cancer costs 1.16 trillion. But there’s an even more expensive question. The question of suffering.

How do people who reckon there is some kind of good God in the world, which surveys tell us is most human beings, cope with cancer in the world?

Back to Ben’s toothache, where it all began. This is Ben’s wife, my dear mate, Karen.

Karen Shaw:
They thought it was an infected wisdom tooth at one stage. So in about June, it swelled up, really bad sort of infection-type swelling, went on antibiotics, and then in July that happened again, and it wasn’t right.

Ben Shaw:
So we’d basically taken matters into our own hands, but we had to because it had swollen and my face was, yeah, looking like a chipmunk on one side.

Karen Shaw:
And they found something that looked like a cyst, and they took the wisdom tooth out and did a biopsy of the cyst and didn’t expect, they said, this is just something we do, this looks really fine, looks benign, looks fine. An, two weeks later you were called to come into an appointment at the Cancer Centre, which was slightly unusual and alarming. The bad news was a diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma, a very large tumour in the jaw, the left side of Ben’s jaw, and he was told that he would have to have a mandibulectomy, a neck resection, and fibulae free flap, which essentially means taking out the left half of the jaw. And four teeth. All the, everything. And reconstructing it using the fibula bone, which is the small bone in the leg. And a piece of skin to graft the gum. So that was essentially the news. But delivering that news was a beautiful professor who did it gently and told Ben that he would only be able to handle some of the news. And so gave it in four consultations.

John Dickson:
Do you remember when you first heard the word cancer?

Ben Shaw:
Well, when this news was first given, I was sitting down and Karen was by my side. And then he began to say, I’m going to take part of your leg and put it in your jaw and I’m going to rob six months of your life and change your life forever. Even though I was sitting down, I had, I started to feel like woozy. And I said to him, I think I need to lie down. It’s, it’s quite amazing to hear something and actually physically go, this is going to put me on the deck if I don’t lie down. So, uh, yeah, thankfully there was a bed in the, in the consultation room. And so I, I lay down on that. I remember you said to me,

John Dickson:
I remember you said to me you asked him ‘What if you didn’t do the surgery’? And he said,

Ben Shaw:
You’ve got 12 months to live, maybe 18.

Studio – John Dickson:

Cancer is so destructive. It’s become a byword for anything that fundamentally undermines and systematically destroys things. We talk about political corruption as a cancer of the state. Buildings get concrete cancer. And if we’re looking for an almost unattainable goal, we talk about the cure for cancer.

Well, Professor Tim Maughan is one of those researchers. Pursuing the unattainable goal. He is professor of clinical oncology and the director of the Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology at the University of Oxford. He oversees dozens of programs designed to understand cancer better. I asked him to go back to the beginning. What is cancer?

Tim Maughan:
Cancer is a disease of cells. And if you think about a cell, it is the most extraordinary, complex, brilliant organization. It’s, it’s more complicated than a Formula One car. It has feedback mechanisms which control it. And our bodies are made up of these wonderful little things called cells. And cancer is a disease when those control mechanisms begin to go wrong. So we have brakes and we have accelerators on all of our cells which control it. And some of the key mistakes that happen due to mutations or Loss of genes, uh, can be analogized to losing your foot brake, or your hand brake. And imagine driving a car when your foot brake doesn’t work, and your hand brake’s failed. And then your foot’s stuck on the accelerator, and then the steering wheel falls off. The engine keeps going, and it’s chaos. That’s what cancer is. Cells that have lost control, and are beginning to behave.

John Dickson:
What are the worst cancers? I mean, most deadly by numbers in our Western societies.

Tim Maughan:
Well, I think pancreas cancer is the most deadly in terms of the number of patients who die of it out of the proportion who get it. So pancreas cancer has been the one where there’s been the least progress. Prognosis is still less than 5 percent survival. And it hasn’t shifted in the last 30 years. The ones that people most commonly die from, well the big four, are lung cancer, bowel cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer. And it does vary across the world according to how much people smoke. In smoking, high smoking areas, lung cancer is always the top. Where smoking is getting less, then the others jockey for top position.

John Dickson:
You lead research teams and work out multi million dollar grants for research teams and so on. So can you tell me, um, Where is the most interesting or hopeful research today? What is the most interesting or hopeful lines of research to combat cancer?

Tim Maughan:
Well, the biggest news in the last five years has been the introduction of effective immunotherapy. So that is basically switching on the immune cell to recognize cancer as foreign and to be able to kill it. And the first drugs in that space have been, they’ve been called checkpoint inhibitors. And it’s kind of like taking the blindfold off the immune system. And those work in cancers where there are high levels of mutations.

Studio – John Dickson:

For Ben and Karen, immunotherapy wasn’t an option.

Karen Shaw:
Yeah, he said there is no choice, you have to have this. And the only way to get rid of it is surgery. And this is the only surgery. He was admitted to hospital and 29th was the surgery. Yeah, so 16 hours of surgery the first time. So that was doing the first procedure. And then, yeah, the emergency.

John Dickson:
You had a blood clot?

Ben Shaw:
Yeah, yeah, the, the um, operation basically failed. I had a twisted artery. Is that right? Uh, and there, um, so there was no blood flow through the new, um jaw. So, uh, thankfully, I mean I was completely out of it, but thankfully, um, one of the nurses cottoned onto this. There was a machine plugged into my jaw basically that was monitoring the blood flow. And the pulse rate and everything. And um, yeah, they realized there was something wrong. So they had to get the surgeon back in who had already just done 16, 17 hours of surgery. And they did a further four or five hours surgery to correct what had happened.

John Dickson:
Do you have any recollection of that or is it just those days that were blurred?

Ben Shaw:  
Oh, well, I don’t know. I was completely out of it. So I, I, I came at, the only thing I can remember is from when I got out of the surgery the second time. Um, Yeah. Yeah, so, and even those, probably the first 24 hours were a bit hazy.

Studio – John Dickson:

 Karen is a medical professional, but it wasn’t enough to insulate her from the grief of watching her husband go through the ravages of cancer.

John Dickson:
Can you put in words what you would feel?

Karen Shaw:
I think you, you and I had a conversation where the first time I Cried was with you just because I had to be strong. I’m in a new job. I’m a director in this hospital I’m trying to be strong for Ben. I’m keeping it together and it’s that crisis mode that you go into My lifeline to people was the group that I’d set up and that yeah The whatsapp group where people were praying and I was sending messages, but it was just like my heart was being squeezed I there were moments. I thought I was gonna lose him Just, I’d just turned 50. So, um, a month before and I thought I’m a widow at 50.

John Dickson:
And then on breathing issues, blood surgery, vomiting through the trachea pipe, all this sort of stuff.

Ben Shaw:
I, I, having a trachean is, I now sympathize with people who’ve had tracheas now because they are horrible.

Studio – John Dickson:

 The trache, Ben’s talking about here of course, isn’t the daggy sweatpants Australians call tracheas. It’s a tracheotomy. That life saving surgical procedure where they cut a hole in the windpipe and insert a tube so the patient can breathe. It’s brilliant, but it’s pretty awful, and it sometimes doesn’t work.

Ben Shaw: 
They’re bad enough in themselves, but when they get a little blocked, then it’s, it’s really It’s so bad, when you can’t, when you feel yourself, you can’t breathe properly. And I had that for at least two or three days, um, and then they finally cleared it. And that was just so relieving.

Karen Shaw:
Ben couldn’t speak. He was writing on a piece of paper. So he would, the frustration would come through by you writing and then banging the piece of paper saying, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Help me. One time he wrote in big letters. Help me. And that for me was just heartbreaking.

Studio – John Dickson:

It’s moments like these when you just can’t hide from the question of suffering. Loads of us ask it, whether we’re believers or sceptics. A friend of mine is a Qantas captain. G’day Cornet. And one evening he was looking out of the flight deck window at thousands of bright stars in the night sky, and he turned to his first officer and said, “Look at that. It’s hard to believe there’s no God, hey?” The first officer shot back, “not when you’ve been through war and seen what I’ve seen”. My mate quickly changed the subject. I think it’s generally agreed today, by philosophers in cool headed moments anyway, that suffering can’t be a knockdown argument against God. Not a logical one anyway. The emotional questions are much more difficult. The popular intellectual argument usually goes like this. One, an all powerful God could end pain. Two, an all good God would end pain. Three, since pain exists, an all powerful, all good God doesn’t exist.

But there’s a widely recognised problem with premise two.We just don’t know that an all good God would necessarily end all pain. In order to sustain that argument, we’d first have to show that God couldn’t, even in principle, have decent reasons for allowing a world in which pain is a reality. In ordinary human life, there are plenty of examples where we ourselves, in good conscience, allow pain for decent ends, whether in self-improvement, in medicine, with our own children, and so on. None of these may correspond to God’s reasons, that’s not really the point. But if we, with our limited knowledge, can think of noble ends that justify pain, we just can’t logically rule out that an infinitely wise God could have infinitely better ends in mind for allowing a world in which pain exists.

This discussion goes way back to Augustine in the 5th century, but it was Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century that set things in the clearest form, and his argument really stands. If creating a universe with the capacity to go astray achieves nobler ends than creating a universe without the capacity to go astray, then an all-good God would choose to create the first kind of universe over the second. And since he’s all-powerful, he’d be able to achieve those ends to the satisfaction of all. And as I say, if we can imagine any case in life where a noble end satisfies the pain associated with it, we at least have an analogy for the divine plan.

I offer this only as a response to those who say that suffering is a logical proof against God’s existence. It really isn’t. But I imagine those of you who have really experienced pain in cancer or some other form will find all this logical analysis a bit tone-deaf and beside the point. It doesn’t really help with the ongoing practical and emotional problem of suffering. Those problems have been around forever and they aren’t going anywhere soon.

Tim Maughan:
There’s evidence of cancer in an Egyptian mummy, so it has been around for a long time. But we know that a lot of cancer is due to, um, environmental factors, like smoking, um, environmental pollution, the diet we eat, various viruses that we pass around between us which set cancer off. For instance, HPV and hepatitis virus. So there are lots of things that increase the risk of, um, cancer, which are related to our modern society.

John Dickson:
How hopeful are you that in 50 years from now, we will be able to conquer most cancers?

Tim Maughan:
I think in another 50 years, we will still have the problem of late presentation. So people turning up, because cancer is subtle, it doesn’t announce itself, and so we will continue to have late presentation in some, particularly the people who don’t particularly join in with screening programs. We will still … cancer will never have one solution.

Studio – John Dickson:

Struggling to find their own solution, Ben and Karen have made it to the intensive care ward. Ben can’t speak. He’s desperately writing. Reaching for relief. And Karen is struggling to understand.

John Dickson:
At one point Ben throws two fingers at you, then three fingers at you, then two fingers at you, then three fingers at you, and then points to his

Karen Shaw:
 Points to his head, and I’m like, think, yeah, so this, a

Ben Shaw:
A nurse came in and I’d asked Karen to read,

Karen Shaw:
 – and you don’t, but you didn’t ask, because you, all you did was two, three, and then point to your head, which is, think about it, two, three, I’m like, I’m trying to work it out, But when he kept going, think it through, Psalm 23, read Psalm 23. And then I was like, Oh, and then I’d start to read and quietly, cause you’re in an intensive care unit, you don’t want to read. And then he’d tell me to elevate my voice, speak louder and then point to the nurse, speak loud enough so the nurse can hear. So I had to. Read really loudly Psalm 23 in the intented key, you know, and he was nodding. The most beautiful thing in that whole time was when I’d read some scripture and you just … it was like a, uh, a smile would come over your face and it’s like, “yep, thank you. I need it. I need this”.

Reading: Psalm 23

Ben Shaw:
It’s amazing how vivid, um, and powerful the scriptures become when you’re, yeah, in a situation like that. And I remember reading a quote somewhere that God sometimes puts us on our backs in order to get us to look up. And I was certainly on my back and looking up to God, thinking, not wise me or woe is me, but just reaching out to God knowing that he was reaching to me. And I noticed the scriptures just became just more vivid.

Studio – John Dickson:

More after the break.

Break

Ben Shaw:
It’s interesting having come out of the surgery and then you sort of see your face is skewered here and you’ve got a new groove in your cheek and that sort of thing. You kind of, um, your looks do matter to you as I thought I wasn’t so vain. I thought, Oh, it won’t matter. But then when you see yourself looking different and not quite the same, you go, ‘Oh, I wish I did look the same’, and, and so it, I’ve become shyer, um, for walking in, into shops and I, I find myself my head down a little more or I’m turning the other way or I put my hand over my, my, my chin. Yeah, so you become a little more self conscious.

Studio – John Dickson:

Ben talks about the fallenness of the world, a kind of discord that interrupts the melody of life. And somehow, he says, God inhabits that fallenness with us. Tim Maughan, one of Britain’s leading cancer warriors says something similar.

John Dickson:
Does thinking about cancer as much as you do in your life dent your Christian faith? I mean, how do you simultaneously believe in a good creator and this malignant thing in our bodies that you face day in day out?

Tim Maughan:
Well, there’s lots of bad things that happen in this world and you only have to visit or work in an undeveloped or developing country to realize that there are many people who have a very, very tough deal in this life. So there are lots of bad things that happen. Bad things happen to good people, bad things happen to all sorts of people, uh, in this world. And the amazing thing to me is that the God operates in that environment and that he comes to meet with people and he walks with us in the middle of that bad stuff. He did that in Jesus, and he does it in life now. So he’s not a God who fixes stuff. He’s not in the sense of making everything nice and rosy. He’s a God who inhabits our frailties and walks with us through our sufferings, and he’s amazing.

Studio – John Dickson:

Press pause. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus.

Ben, Karen, and Tim all speak of God being present in the ugliness of the world. I think this is one of the most unusual aspects of what the Bible says about pain and suffering. The most pressing question for those actually experiencing pain isn’t why does God allow it, but where is he? What’s his attitude?

I mean, when my daughter Josie hurts herself, she doesn’t rush and ask, ‘Dad, why the pain? How will it be resolved’? She just wants to cry, and she wants to know that I’ve got her, that I’m with her, that I sympathize.

The Old Testament in the Bible invites everyone who wants to cry out to God. My mate Ben mentioned Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd” and all that. But the psalm immediately before it strikes a very different note. Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer.” Pretty confronting stuff.

It’s a reminder that sometimes crying out, my God, is just as rational, just as  permissible, as saying, “the Lord is my shepherd”.

The presence of Psalm 22. Immediately before, the more famous Psalm 23 tells us that God is okay with both. God invites us to cry out to him. But the most extraordinary part of the Bible’s plot line is that God showed up in the ugliness, personally. He Himself has experienced rejection, injury, agony, a final breath. And this is nowhere clearer than in the crucifixion scene in all of the gospels. There, the cry of the anguished poet of Psalm 22 actually becomes the cry and circumstances of Jesus on the cross. In his final moments, Jesus searched for words to convey his innermost feelings, and he cried Psalm 22.

Mark 15 says:

“At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani'”, which means, citing Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This is not a cry of self doubt from Jesus lips. This is a deliberate and agonizing identification with the suffering poet of Psalm 22. And so with anyone who’s ever felt like crying, ‘My God, why’?

This vision of God can comfort those who suffer, not just because He is all knowing, but because he’s experienced pain firsthand. God isn’t passive, it turns out. Not distant, but involved, and Himself wounded.

It’s a point made, actually, by one of the 20th century’s greatest atheists, the Frenchman Albert Camus. Camus usually wrote of the futility of life, the unrelenting silence of the universe, but he admitted that he saw in the cross a potential answer to human longing for divine sympathy. In his essay, which became a book, The Rebel, he wrote these words:

“The man-God suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him, since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man, only because in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges, and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death.”

Camus was an atheist, but he knew something about the core of the Christian faith. If it’s true that God knows our pain first-hand because he’s experienced it, it follows that we don’t just shout at God as the one ultimately responsible for this universe. We can run to him for comfort, knowing that he’s been there, he understands, he’s got us.

Ultimately, that’s what Christianity offers us in our pain. Not just some philosophy, but a story of the God who himself shares our wounds. You can press play now.

Ben has been smacked across the head, literally, by his cancer. He’s lost some things along the way. But he hasn’t lost his guitar, nor his perspective.

Musical interlude of Ben playing Amazing Grace on guitar

John Dickson:
So I have to ask the question, what on earth do you make of cancer from a Christian point of view? How do you get your head around that?

Ben Shaw:
Well, both you and I know, um, perhaps more acutely than some others of the, of a world that’s broken, which includes cancer and suffering and death. So having lost my mum when I was seven years old, I was already attuned to a broken, fallen world that includes our bodies. So, in a weird way, I was slightly prepared for it and I’d always thought all my life that you know, one day I’m going to get something. You know, none of us are going to live forever. So I was kind of prepared for it. 

John Dickson:
Do you feel the pressure to act like you believe that stuff you’ve been preaching, or are you really feeling those things?

Ben Shaw:
Ha! I don’t feel any pressure, um, none, none whatsoever. I just really believe that, um, I’m, yeah, none of this has affected my faith whatsoever.

Karen Shaw:
It strengthened mine. I think that I physically felt, even though there wasn’t anyone with me during the whole procedure, particularly through the crisis period, just the Bible and the comfort through the Bible, I felt a physical connection that I hadn’t had before. And also just that utter reliance on the Lord. It’s something I’ve never needed as much, and there is something quite beautiful in crisis tragedy that as a Christian clinging to that promise of the Lord, I felt a physical comfort that I really haven’t had before, even though we’ve had a few crisis at church and walking through pain and suffering with other people. I haven’t had that before, and I actually look back on it even though it was tragic. It was quite beautiful as well.

Ben Shaw: 
I do believe the Bible. I do believe that it teaches us that we’re in a broken, fallen world that is in constant decay, including our bodies. I often tell people in my church that four things break in the Garden of Eden. Our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, our bodies, and even creation itself is mud, and so I’ve been preaching that doctrine for years, decades, and now I’m just more of a visual living example of it.

Studio – John Dickson:

I’m not pretending that this solves everything. I still ask questions. Watching my dearest mate go through cancer, still going through cancer, has challenged me. Not so much intellectually, but certainly psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. I’ve been reminded again of what one of my favourite writers wrote a few years ago. Francis Buffard was a British atheist and intellectual who, through an experience of life’s sadness, actually found himself almost accidentally an Anglican. He wrote:

“We don’t ask for a creator who can explain himself. We ask for a friend in time of grief. A true judge in time of perplexity. We don’t say that God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world, not deep down. We say, all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story. For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time in all of human history is to be that man in the crowd, a man under arrest and on his way to our common catastrophe.”