the c-word

The arrows of fate have, for the most part, landed around my life and the people I care for; disease and sickness have mostly been relegated to textbooks and stories.

But this last week the c-word invaded my consciousness, usurped my attention, spread reaching tendrils through most waking moments.  Cancer isn't supposed to happen to your friends, your peers; it's something that happens to the elderly, something that you deal with in middle age as it fells those of your parents' generation.  It's not supposed to happen the first time, much less the second, to someone who is 25 and has no risk factors for disease.  And, no matter what the literature said, we all had hoped the "all-clear" signals would be clear for good.

It is amazing what the weight of emotion and urgent need will do to assist memory: herceptin, avastin, bevacizumab, all the -ab and -mab biologic drugs... you have my attention now.  Palliative care textbook - you have my attention now.  Clinicaltrials.gov - you have my attention now.  All the chemo drugs and tumorigenic pathways that I so struggled with in medical school are slipping into my brain and consciousness almost effortlessly - because they matter, desperately so.

One of my friends told me, "I want to cure cancer." Oh, how I wish being a scientist (in training) gave me the power to do so.  But science rarely moves in real time; it moves at the pace of months and years and decades.  And yet, and yet - perhaps we will reap the fruit of the decades of labor preceding us. We can hope for the best and prepare for the worst, taking things moment by moment - because this is life, and we have no choice but to go forward.

I remember, now, why I am burning a decade of my life in the pursuit of medicine, mathematics, and science.  Somehow it will all come together.  Somehow.