What other word would you use? For myself I don’t feel I ever ‘fought’ my lymphoma, radiotherapy did that. My ‘fight’ was with my own, new, sense of mortality, the damage to my self image as a strong and healthy person and then the consequences of the radiotherapy. I did ‘fight’ in the sense that I made a conscious effort to stay positive, refused to back out of mayhem which was during my treatment and set myself new challenges to look forward to which culminated one year after diagnosis with riding snowdon and scrambling up tryfan on a fantastically sunny day :)
I agree with the OP in that there is an unfortunate value attribution which results from the use of words such as fight, struggle and battle but feel that fight is probably the best word that can be used, given the way we talk about cancer as a personal journey.