Even at my age, new thoughts invade my being. I go along living my life thinking that I've thought it all, that I've lived it all and there is just so much that I know already that there is not much more room in my coconut for anything else. Yesterday was not really one of those moments, nevertheless, a reality I never expected encroached upon my spiritual presence in Jerusalem, just 90 minutes before going to the Stations of the Cross at 2:30 PM. I had dropped the Voice from the Kitchen off at an appointment and was turning the car around to head back home. With her out of the car, I turned on the radio, pointed in the direction of my favorite NPR station, KPBS, broadcasting from the State University of San Diego (SDSU, for short). Terry Gross, an NPR interviewer with excellent credentials was interviewing the author of a Pulitzer Prize award winning book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer." The author is Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist and professor at the Columbia University Medical School. If you are interested, you can listen to the entire 32 minutes and 40 some odd seconds interview by clicking here. I only heard about 8 to 10 minutes of the interlocutory, but the part that got me was the answer to the question, It seems then that cancer must be a part of our very beings. Is that true? Here's the good doctor's response:
"If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes," he says. "And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but [it turns out] that cancer genes are sitting inside of each and every one of our chromosomes, waiting to be corrupted or activated."
Now, if that is a thought that doesn't change your way of looking at life, it makes me wonder if there will ever be another one quite so powerful as this one. "...cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes..." That explains why non-smokers get throat and lung cancer; also why some heavy smokers live to be 100. It is also why both breast-feeding mothers and non-breast-feeding mothers get breast cancer, and the list goes on. It changes our mind to know that the smoke from burning leaves is not the cancer bearer, but could be (accent on could) the carrier of the trigger that could get you to develop cancer but not me...from the same smoke from the same fire. Cancer, then, happens when cells within us fall out of balance with the rest of their chromosomal environment and send that specific part of our being into what often turns out to be fatal dysfunction.
There are many human anomalies that activate themselves from within us. Cancer, however, is the one that we, as a society, fear the most. I remember when an uncle was diagnosed with the malady, he would only say that he had contracted the Big "C".
The doctor explained then what the challenge for the medical profession really is with regards the control, not the eradication, mind you, of this "Emperor of All Maladies." In fact he brings out the fact that there are more people alive in this day and age with "remitted cancer" than ever before. Yes, we are making progress. The key to making more progress is to look inside of ourselves, more than outside.
This was a life experience for me. Maybe it would not be for you. I had to talk about it anyway.
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