How do metaphors shape and reflect patients' experience of cancer? How can repeated immersion in challenging poetry affect our understanding of cancer and other diseases? This essay addresses these two questions through an exploration of the varied and sometimes contradictory metaphors crafted by poet and seven-time cancer patient Judy Rowe Michaels. Although cancer is often regarded as an enemy intrusion to be eradicated, it is an illness in which the threat to life comes from within the self. Michaels's metaphors complicate the relationship between an embodied self and the cancerous cells the body produces, presenting multifarious responses to living with cancer. Defying expectations of a linear trajectory from symptom to diagnosis to treatment to recovery, these metaphors provide a means to understand the changing emotions; the changing relationship to illness, to wellness, and to self; and the changing status as patient (symptomatic, diagnosed, in treatment, in remission, in recurrence) that characterize the lived experience of cancer-and of other recurring or chronic diseases. Examining these poems demonstrates the value for practitioners, patients, and families of honing a poet's mode of understanding, as a vital complement to the mode of thinking that currently drives health care.

中文翻译：

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转移隐喻：诗歌、癌症意象和想象的自我

隐喻如何塑造和反映患者对癌症的体验？反复沉浸在具有挑战性的诗歌中如何影响我们对癌症和其他疾病的理解？本文通过探索诗人和七次癌症患者朱迪·罗·迈克尔斯 (Judy Rowe Michaels) 精心设计的各种有时相互矛盾的隐喻来解决这两个问题。尽管癌症通常被视为需要根除的敌人入侵，但它是一种对生命的威胁来自于自身的疾病。迈克尔斯的比喻使具身自我与身体产生的癌细胞之间的关系复杂化，呈现出对癌症生活的多种反应。这些隐喻违背了从症状到诊断到治疗再到康复的线性轨迹的期望，提供了一种理解不断变化的情绪的方法；与疾病、健康和自我的关系不断变化；以及作为患者（有症状、已确诊、治疗、缓解、复发）的变化状态，这些状态表征了癌症以及其他复发或慢性疾病的生活经历。对这些诗歌的研究表明，磨练诗人的理解方式对从业者、患者和家属来说是有价值的，这是对当前推动医疗保健的思维方式的重要补充。