Cancer and all that jazz

Let me preface this entire piece by saying that this is not a finished "bit" and may never be.


Cancer is a funny thing, not funny ha ha but funny peculiar. When you’re diagnosed you have four options of treatment, operate, radiate, kill it with chemo or a combination of all three. There is one other option, do nothing, sit back, wait and see. Now this fifth option is a risky alternative. You’re basically saying, “I am going to take a chance that this cancer will just disappear and I’m going to be just fine again”. You take the chance that the cancer, your cancer, will not invade and destroy the rest of your body.

Cancer is an efficient, uncaring and determined foe. It knows when, where and how to attack. It wages a well planned, well provisioned war on your body. Its supply lines are protected, its intelligence is exact and its retreats, if any, are only ever strategic. Cancer can be a very patient adversary. It’s willing to lie dormant, seemingly defeated for years only to - when you finally allow yourself to begin to believe that possibly, this time; it’s gone for good - reappear, refreshed and ready to rumble.

Cancer perverts. It perverts your healthy cells and turns them against you. One diseased cell becomes two becomes four becomes eight etc etc. Doubling and redoubling, recruiting seemingly eager participants through out your body. Cancer is the al-Qaeda of diseases.

If you’re a cancer patient, you often feel marginalised and paralysed by the competing jargon and treatments recommended by dispassionate doctors who can not allow themselves to become personally involved because the weight of each attachment would, for them, become unbearable. An array of men and women in smart white coats and nifty ties, oftentimes stand over your bed and argue back and forth about differing treatment options. Words that you have only ever heard before on episodes of “House” and then only after you have had at least two, okay, three glasses of wine.

Who do you trust, who do you believe?

Doing nothing is not an option. Ultimately you must become involved. You have to on some level take charge and become the driver of this journey and not the back seat passenger. It’s not acceptable to sit back and be passive about this.

Own your disease, own your journey. Everything you do must be proactive.

Cancer it seems to me is a perfect metaphor for the environment and for our relationship to it. Anything that is left alone and allowed to become infected will destroy its host.

If we take the Holistic view, we are all linked. On a cellular level we all come from the same chemicals and minerals that create our world, our planet. Like a cancer patient our world, our Earth, is struggling to find a path through the various diagnosis to achieve one common goal, healing. We continue to look at this planet, this earth, as something that is outside of us, an external force that we are not part of. Something we can control. When we begin to see that we are as one with it, then we are making that first small but important step towards the solution. We would never leave our own wounds open and uncared for, why then should we even consider the possibility of not cleansing and caring for our environment.

Our planet needs healing, we need healing. We are the cancer cell spreading through this world raping, pillaging and plundering to satisfy our ever changing, ever selfish, desires.

While our planet, our Earth, heaves and gasps for breath, the Doctors and Scientists stand over us giving different and divergent diagnosis. “It’s cyclical”, “We only have a few years left”, “Leave it, it ain’t broke”, and “We stand on the abyss”. Each one of these pundits has a professional PowerPoint production filled with statistics and reports and more statistics and more reports to prove that their point of view is the correct one. Each one confuses and discounts the other. It’s hard to know who or what to believe. Gore versus Lomborg.

Kubler Ross talks about the seven stages of grief in her book, “On Death and Dying”, if we apply that paradigm to where we stand now, we are bouncing around between denial, anger and bargaining. Each of these steps is promoting passivity, not action. When we get passed all of this to acceptance then we begin to find a way forward.

No matter which side of the argument you agree with, it’s obvious that we are not doing all that we can to treat our planet, our Earth, with respect. Forget Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, surely our most basic philosophy should be, do no harm. From that simple statement we then take the next step and start to “do good”. We can begin to create our own, new, reality.

I know that none of this is jaw dropping, earth shattering news to any of you. And it’s a bit like shouting fire after the fire brigade has been phoned. For me the world is too big and if I look at the Amazon, the Arctic, Indonesia, the Sudan, it all becomes so overwhelming that I really think it is easier to do nothing, to take that fifth option. Is Kyoto the answer, god knows, I sure as heck don’t.

Who do you trust, who do you believe?

What I believe is simply that our life force and the planets life force is linked in such an intimate embrace that we dare not close our heart to the suffering of each other. If we turn our backs, shut our eyes and ears, we do nothing but harm ourselves. When we are long gone, like the Dinosaur or the Dodo bird, then our time here will be measured in cosmic seconds not centuries. What legacy did we leave in those few brief seconds?