Thursday, June 12, 2014
It just occurred to me today, without really putting a conscious effort into working it out, that I have, in fact, chosen, for the forseeable future, a subspecialty in Internal Medicine that has about as little of the C-word as I can possibly find, with some glaring exceptions.
Of course, by the C-word, I mean C-A-N-C-E-R.
Following that realisation, which doesn't actually come supported by much logic - if you critically think about it, you'd be like, Don't be an IDIOT, A--, what about Cardiology, or Infectious Diseases, or Rheumatology? Where's the cancer in those specialties. And yes, you are absolutely spot on in that analysis and I am once again proven to be susceptible to the fault of over-generalisation and sadly also only capable of making lists that are about three points long, maximum. I.e. Respiratory Medicine, Gastroenterology, Oncology and -BAM- there you have it, I excluded all specialties without Cancer.
Not to mention, I might add, rather detrimentally to my own flawed logic, that the thyroid gland is mightily susceptible to the big C, though the tiny caveat I might quote in counter-argument is that which many a university lecturer loves to muse, "If you could choose the kind of cancer you get, you want it to be a papillary thyroid carcinoma."
Okay, ignore my crazy logic for a moment, while I get to the point of this rambling post and why I am breaking the long silences on my blog with another rare outburst of inanity.
The big C.
I hate it. I loathe it. I despise it to the marrow of my bones, perhaps even more so than I hate cigarette-smokers and their selfish insistence on killing everyone around them while they pursue their leisurely suicidal hobby.
You have to give it to Cancer. It is composed of the kind of marvel of engineering and art that underlies all of life - and whether you believe it comes from divine creation or evolution or something in between, the fact remains that life is in fact quite breathtakingly beautiful and incomprehensibly complicated. Except, in the case of Cancer, it is that beauty completely reversed and possessed with a single unerring thought: to Grow. And in so doing, consume everything else, including the life that bore it. It defies all efforts to decimate and destroy it with the same force of ingenuity and tenacity that you would use to characterise the human will to live. Just as no genocide can wipe out every single person it aims to annihilate, just so, no cancer treatment thus far known to man, besides physically resecting that entire part of the body, will kill every last cancer cell. Just a single surviving cancer cell will return with a vengeance.
And so, my reader, I present you with the depressing reality that Cancer is inexorable and implacable. It arises from within you and is a part of you and yet wholly not, because it seeks to grow regardless of its surrounds and could care less if it consumed you utterly from the inside and in so doing resulted in the death of its host and thus itself. What living organism would pursue its own destruction with no mode of transmission beyond that final end?
Cancer is a cunning trickster. It lulls you into thinking it is in "remission" and then it returns with a figurative laugh so loud you will feel your existence quaver. It is an unstoppable tide. And hope is all well and good but too often cancer wins. Hope loses. How many PET scans I've looked at - "tumour stable in size"; "tumour reduced in size"; "tumour increased in size"; "new lesions noted"; the list is endless and the result almost always the same. Reduction is only a temporary stay of execution; a merciful pause in the relentless assault from the mindless enemy. In the end it will take you, and you can rage all you want against it, scream and cry and plead; it is implacable Death, emotionless as it smothers you and takes away all your faculties. I would bet it doesn't even spend a moment to think about what the meaning of triumph is. The battle it has won against your dying body means nothing to it, only that is has lost the mode of its continued survival.
So if it is so implacable an enemy, why do I rail against it? Should I not submit? Death comes for us all, in the end. The truth of that is undeniable and I accept that I might very well succumb to cancer as well. As a human being, though, I cannot help but treasure my autonomy and detest that which takes it away from me. Let me go into the long night, but as my own man, not one subject to the destruction of my body by its very own substance, that leaves me incapacitated and so, so very pitiful and with no shred of dignity. I've seen too many people go that way, my father included, to have any illusions about the dying with dignity as far as cancer is concerned.
Perhaps I just cannot see past the negative aspects to find hope in treating cancer, and in fighting this implacable enemy. I concede defeat and retreat from the battle, to let others with more fortitude fight the war. This is not my fight, and unless it comes to me, I will not willingly join the fray.
Avaris / 6/12/2014 10:43:00 PM
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