As Your Doctor, I Am Protesting the Removal of Your Tumor Because I Don’t Want to Erase Your Medical History

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” — @realDonaldTrump, 8/17/17

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Thank you very much for coming in today to discuss the tumor currently growing inside your body. Luckily, we caught this fairly early on, so we have a few treatment options available to us. As you can see on this X-ray, the tumor is currently about the size of a baseball in an all-white baseball league. I could surgically remove it as soon as tomorrow afternoon. However, I will not be doing that.

I view this tumor as an important symbol of your body’s history and heritage. Removing the tumor would be yet another example of misguided medical correctness in today’s liberal America. I protest this surgery and refuse to whitewash your rich medical history. The tumor must be kept prominently displayed inside your body.

I understand why you’d want to remove the tumor. By removing it, we would stop the cancer from spreading to other parts of your body and you’d be on your way to recovery. Don’t you think, though, that your body’s fight against cancer should be commemorated in some way? What better way than by leaving the tumor completely intact? Medical Justice Warriors all want to dismantle the very fabric of everyone’s medical history and remove important memorials such as tumors, goiters, and gallstones. I want to celebrate that history and leave a monument to those awful memories inside your body forever.

As a medical professional, I want patients to celebrate the history and legacy of their illnesses. Tearing down tumors won’t serve that cause. A better solution would be to add more history to this issue. I propose we add a small inscription or plaque on the outside of your body, somewhere near the tumor’s location. The inscription should contextualize and describe the tumor, so that you and anybody else reading it can draw their own conclusions about the tumor. I will not be party to an erasure of history for the mere sake of your health. There are fundamental American freedoms at stake here.

You might be asking yourself exactly why I’m so passionate about leaving this awful, life-threatening tumor inside your body. Well, if I preside over the tumor’s dismantling, what’s next? Prescribing you medication for your pain? Starting you on a rigorous physical therapy program? Eventually getting you back to feeling healthy? The removal of your tumor is only the beginning of a slippery slope, the end of which will be sanitizing great swaths of your current medical condition. If liberal medicine had its way, no one would ever be able to tell that you were even sick. I refuse to censor your body and its past like that.

I do not believe the viewpoint that tumors “embody” or “represent” cancer. That is a straw man argument that I will not tolerate. It’s what the loudest voices have decided tumors do. Your medical history may not be perfect, but it represents the journey you have taken to get to this point of being sick and requiring immediate medical attention. That journey is what gets lost in these blind, partisan efforts to remove tumors.

Whatever your stance on this tumor may be, there is no denying its significance in your medical history. I will not take part in the zealous march to remove the life-threatening tumor from your body. To do so would be to participate in medical revisionism and body censorship.