The husband of a close collegial friend at STC recently underwent an operation for colon cancer. Cancer does not strike the same chord of fear in people that it once did, but it should. Doctors and the medical community are trying to convince all of us that survival rates are up, the view of cancer should change to "living with cancer," and that cancer is a survivable event. Since all that medical talk is "change of tone" rather than
"change of substantial fact" I prefer to accept cancer for what it is -- a life-threatening disease that cannot, at this point, be cured by medical science.
Cancers can be arrested for a time; they can be slowed to the level of no discernible growth -- but they cannot be cured. Inevitably they grow again -- or they are metastasized to some other area of the body. Cancer is not the devil -- but it is not a benign sickness.
There are so many different kinds of cancer that it is unthinkable to imagine that somehow you need not worry about it. Cancer, in many ways subtle and general, changes the order of things in everyone who is touched by the disease.
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