From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers
stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry first
appeared in December of 2011.
I’m re-posting
this today because Olympic gold medal swimmer announced a few days ago that he
is undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. Here’s a link to the current USA
Today article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2019/01/24/olympic-swimmer-nathan-adrian-diagnosed-testicular-cancer/2670220002/
So this week I got
the news that two good friends of mine have cancer. One has colon cancer and
will be undergoing a colECTOMY (ecto = Greek for “to cut out”) during the
Christmas season.
The other is
twenty-some years younger than me. He was diagnosed with testicular cancer and
had a radical orchiectomy after which…well, we don’t know because they are in
the specific diagnosis part of his New Normal. He said he’d let me know because
I pray well for biological specifics – I can see the parts of the body that are
affected – cancer, breaks, dislocations, flu. I am a great prayer for healing
of body parts as well as for restoring the heart and mind.
At any rate, some
time ago, my wife asked “Why do so many people have breast cancer?” I marshaled
statistics in this post: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-do-so-many-women-have-breast-cancer.html
The research led
me to the statistics for other kinds of cancer – lung cancer, Liz’s mom died
from this; blood cancer (leukemia), the son of close family friends; brain
cancer, an old friend of mine died from this at 30; skin cancer, my sister,
brother and sister-in-law have this; there are others with other cancers that I
don’t care to enumerate at this time.
Testicular cancer
has increased by 60% in the past 25 years. Why? Right now no one knows the
answer, it just…has.
A student of mine,
after we talked about why my wife’s hair all fell out during chemo. I talked
about how the chemicals target fast-growing cancer cells – and kill the
fast-growing hair cells “accidentally”. She then went on a rave about how we
should make drugs that ONLY target cancer cells…and that got me to thinking.
Are all cancer
cells created equal? Or are they egalitarian? Is testicular cancer the same as
breast cancer? Brain cancer? Lung cancer? Skin cancer?
Questions – and
today…no answers. Just more questions that I’m going to try to answer in the
future…
No comments:
Post a Comment