When you talk to cancer patients it’s always interesting to hear where their minds take them.
Some go back to a time B-C, before cancer, when they thought a driver cutting-in to get ahead of the traffic was the worst thing that could happen that day. Others remember back to long days at work, when they felt the fatigue of extra hours in front of a computer screen.
Oh, for those days again. They don’t compare to the nausea of chemo or the fatigue of two minutes of radiation.
Then there’s the patient who wonders out loud, “Is there a place where there is no cancer?’
Interesting question. I bet there is such a place. I can only imagine it’s some where so remote that environment, diet and living conditions have yet to open the door to the beast. Maybe it’s a place buried deep in a rain forest, ripe with plants that are a natural enemy to cancer cells or could it be high in the Himalayas, where air is as rare as cancer.
I’d like to believe it exists because I’d like to believe cancer has its limits.
August 29, 2013 @ 8:33 pm
Me too. I’d also like to believe we’ll find those limits with the research and ideas that are being developed. Though the rain forest idea atop of the mountain sounds pretty good too. I’d be glad to go there. ~Catherine
August 29, 2013 @ 3:57 pm
I just started reading George Johnson’s ‘The Cancer Chronicles’. Cancer was found in dinosaurs. It has been documented in the livers of trout and in other fish, in sharks, turtles, and reptiles (melanoma and lymphatic leukemia in snakes). Even plants, Johnson writes, “get something resembling cancer.” Many domestic animals die of it. It is at once fascinating and appalling as a subject of study. We humans suffer its mysteries most of all.