Marketing and Cheesy Movies

     Several people have spoken with me about visualizing my cancer.  Research has shown the benefits of picturing your cancer and imagining your body or your chemo attacking the cancer.  People come up with all kinds of really creative ways to visualize--most recently the sassy reincarnation of my mother-in-law spoke about picturing her tumors exploding into fireworks.  So I feel really disappointed in myself that my visualization is not creative at all, but directed by straight-up American marketing and my childhood love of wasting a Saturday afternoon watching B-movies on Channel 2 or Channel 44 (remember the second dial on the TV?).  So I have no original thoughts in this area.
     First let's talk about my visualization of my cancer.  I visualized it instantly as a grapefruit because...the doctor said, "It's the size of a grapefruit."  Okay.  That's easy.  But I love me some grapefruit--citrus of all kinds!  So there's no way I'm going to be picturing something as heinous as cancer as one of the best taste treats ever!  So after we moved away from fruit, my instant and unwavering picture of my cancer has been:  The green slimy Mucous Creatures from the Mucinex advertising campaign.

I am Andrea's Lymphoma Tumor!! Aaaarrr! I sound like a pirate!

     Yes, really.  A grapefruit-sized one of those suckers, but that cartoonish, gargle-voiced, slimy green personification of mucous.  Except it's cancer.  It's still green.  Still talks that way (hmmm...kind of sounds like me if I'm out of Minnie Mouse mode).  But it's a direct steal from their marketing.  I feel disappointed in myself for not being able to come up with something out of the box...lazy brain, I guess.
     But now let's talk about my visualization of how my body or my chemo is killing this walking, talking, green tumor.  But I have to back up a bit. (Cue the hazy screen dissolve to black and white--ooh, flashback!):
     When I was growing up I would look forward every weekend to a TV show called Creature Feature on Channel 2.  They would show a double-feature of any kind of combination of old, cheesy, so-crappy-they-are-golden movies.  There was some "host" of the show who would give little intros to the movies.  The movies could run the gamut from horror, suspense, or science fiction--it all counted as a Creature Feature, even when the movie had no iconic creature involved.  I saw all kinds of classics:  Godzilla, The Thing, all kinds of Vincent Price goodies, many Frankensteins and Draculas and aluminum-disc spaceships.  Loved every minute of it! 
     So does anyone remember a  movie starring Raquel Welch called Fantastic Voyage?  Where Raquel and several less-important people were shrunk down in a super cool-looking ship to microscopic size and went tooling around through someone's body in their circulatory system?  I think at one point the ship is attacked by a white blood cell?  "AAAAAAAHHHH!!  Aaaarrgghhhhhh!"  someone dies, I think, all gruesome and drowning in white foamy yack.  Go white blood cells!
     Okay, so it was made in 1966, and I'm sure I saw it sometime in the early 1970s.  I thought it was the most amazing movie I had ever seen! Science fiction AND biology?  Suspense AND anatomy?  Total drama inside a human body?  And Raquel Welch looking hot and being a brainiac?  (Okay, please tell me she was a scientist or something--I do remember her being more than eye candy.)  Anyway, it was some race-against-time thing, and of course it all works out in the end, and whoever needs to be saved is saved, I'm sure. 
     But anyway, THAT is how I picture my body or my chemo coming to get my cancer.  Now, do I actually picture Raquel all tiny in the driver's seat? 


Was she smokin' hot or what?  I'll bet my dad watched this movie with me that afternoon.  How could he not?

     Okay, I don't picture all the tiny people.  But I picture the ship itself.  It was rad.  So I picture that ship zooming through my veins to go to the tumor and...I don't know.  It probably zaps it all Star Wars style.  I don't really get that specific.  But here's the ship--it was just so completely modern and amazing when I was a little kid:

Go get that cancer!! Scotty, warp speed!  Make it so!  Chop chop, poRk-CHOP! 

And in this case, the ship in my visualization is not being attacked by white blood cells. It makes it all the way to the tumor.  But if I have to picture a little person piloting that ship, I could do worse than an 1966 Raquel Welch--I'll bet she has a knife on that utility belt and she knows how to use it!  Don't mess with Raquel!