That is such a stupid appropriation of the term: "Oh, she's a cancer survivor!" "Oh! He battled through cancer! He's a survivor!"
As someone who still has another year to go on the state's cancer list, and as the only one who has lived more than two years after that kind of rare sarcoma was diagnosed, I think I'm qualified to say B.S. You don't "battle" cancer any more than you "battle" the common cold. Got over your cold? Hey, cool! You're a survivor!
I figure that everyone who's living falls into that category.
When my sarcoma was diagnosed, I didn't "battle" - I went into dual-beam radiation for six weeks because the damned thing had started wrapping itself around my vascular and nerve bundles. So when the lead surgeon on the team told me I needed dual-beam for six weeks, my immediate reaction was to ask if that meant they were going to send in a couple of folks to stand around and grin at me.
No such luck - what it means is that they hit you with double the dose of radiation that they'd use on, say, a breast-cancer patient, and they hit you from above and below; hence, dual-beam. They do that to kill off as much as they can in hopes of saving the arm. It also burns all of the skin off your arm-pit, so you learn to walk a bit differently, holding the arm out so it doesn't adhere.
I figured that with all that radiation, I could save a ton of money on night-lights; just hold my arm out, and light my way downstairs at home.
No such luck. It doesn't work that way.
So after radiation, you get about a month of recovery time before you go to surgery. The lead surgeon has to do a half hour of "here's what can go wrong", emphasizing that he has to get every last cancer cell because this one's so aggressive. After that, he asks if you have any questions.
"Well, ordinarily it wouldn't occur to me, but the folks on TV say I should ask my doctor".
He leaned back in his chair and pulled a serious face.
"Is my heart healthy enough for sexual activity?"
He was poleaxed. After a minute he burst out laughing and said I was healthy enough for just about anything.
As I was in the prep area, he went out and found my wife, and asked if I was always like this. "Like what?", she asked. So he told her a few of my lines, and she affirmed that yes, "He's pretty much always like that".
"And that's what's going to save his life!", he said. Until then, she hadn't realized quite the severity of the situation.
My view? I'm not a "survivor" or a "battler" - I just got treatment for a problem and handled it with occasional humor because I assumed that cancer teams have to deal with scared or angry people all the time, so why should I add to their heartburn? Quite the contrary, I gave them something to laugh about. I think it worked well for all of us.