Table 2.

Examples of Metaphors and Analogies

Analogies	Metaphors
The daily treatments are only about 15–20 minutes. You know, it's pretty much just like getting an x-ray.	A spindle is a kind of highway that moves the chromosomes apart.
The rash will look just like a sunburn.	Your bone marrow is an elephant. It has a long memory. It remembers everything it has ever seen before.
You won't feel anything. The energy goes right through you—like getting an x-ray.	What we're doing, in essence, is to give you an entirely new immune system.
It's like saying you have a little bit of cancer or a lot of cancer, you know, it's not very helpful. It's helpful sometimes for us to decide who to treat or who not to treat, but it's kind of like being a little bit pregnant, having a little bit of cancer.	The stem cells we have are like tomato seeds, and think of the tomato fruit as the cells that circulate in the blood. So the stem cells are like seeds we take out of you so we can give very high doses of chemotherapy that can damage what's left in you and then we give you back those seeds so it can regrow.
Interleukin is like the IL-2 you've already taken.	[A cell signaling pathway] is the “on” switch for growth.
[Having a bone marrow biopsy] feels like you've been kicked by a horse.	[Your treatment regimen] isn't a sprint. It's more like a long run. A marathon. You have to pace yourself.
You'll feel as though you have the flu.	[The treatment] is the bullet, or missile, that we'll aim at that target.
But like … pain, [your depression] still hurts, even though there's a reason for it. It still interferes with your functioning. So we can treat your depression. We can help you.	[A dysplastic cell-line's] like weeds in your garden that take over a garden, it chokes everything else out. And so the way to treat it is to use a weed killer, so you get rid of all that bad stuff. And slowly, the good stuff comes back.
It's like a little pea.	The dendritic cells are the script writers of your immune system.
You know you can live with [ovarian cancer] for a long time. I mean, you can live with diabetes for 50 years. There's a lot of diseases that we don't cure, we just manage. Hypertension, right? We don't cure it, we just give you a pill to take every day that keeps it under control.	A wall in your house has many studs. So one stud in the middle of it has cancer, but the ends are fine. Or in another bone, the end has the breast cancer, but the middle is fine. It's not that it just goes (whistle) through the entire stud.
Participating in an experimental trial is like being a pioneer, of sorts.	[Regarding your disease-free survival] you're in the top 20% of your class.
[A nutritional supplement] is just like a milkshake.	If it's anything bacterial (the antibiotic) will kill it with a … mallet. Not a mallet, what am I thinking of, that word, like, a sledgehammer.