@Spirit_Walking
Between faith and fate...a Miracle
Diagnosed with cancer is nothing less than terrifying. Woebegone and overlooked by others, who would welcome the prospect of becoming extinct?
A more germane question: Who among us know someone diagnosed with some form of the disease; or who has died from cancer, or prevailed to describe having suffered from the ravages of chemotherapy and/or radiation—living in the perpetual flurry of doctors and nurses, and with one's own unaccompanied self facing a medical apparatus of one kind or another?
A safe bet, people afflicted know something of feeling dispossessed and abandoned to the disease, hallmark moments of loneliness when we're left to our own solitary company. Surrounded by family and friends, a paradoxical aloneness is in a kind of frightened isolation, a rueful solace of feeling that the end is near.
The "cure for cancer" is a subject that has been mulled over by experts in the field, often defined as the nemesis in a "war" and yet widely regarded as a great fictional character of sorts by those too removed from the disease to be concerned.
On the personal front, my wife battled breast cancer throughout 2009; and recently my father, somehow knowing he had the disease in his prostate, retreated into states of aloneness. Both of them, struck by that unfortunate sense of exiting existential reality, took it on faith that their sufficiently developed awareness of death might be nearer than they thought.
Thankfully, my wife is today a cancer survivor, and my father's fear has been set aside as merely an infection (so far). Are they "cancer-free"? God willing.
Digging deep into the research ferrets out intimations that the immune system can help fight the disease. Above and beyond such factoids are the underlying anomie of drugs commodified into percieved nostrums (or some-such) that can be prescribed by doctors and sold by pharmaceutical companies.
Being on the outside looking in, I have been beset indirectly by this disease which has acquired its own stink.
To a disturbing extent, babies are born 'pre-polluted'
I recently read an article published by the Washington Post in which writer Lyndsey Layton reported "grievous harm" to the public with cancer linked to air, food and water that heretofore had gone unregulated and ignored.
Environmental as well as occupational exposure to cancer an unacceptable burden, the President's Cancer Panel wrote in a report that "the growing body of evidence" points to exposures to cancer "that could have been prevented through appropriate national action" but where none was taken.
Facing weak federal chemical laws, children particularly are vulnerable, as reported by Layton, with funding for research and enforcement both inadequate; the panel finding regulatory responsibility splintered among far too many agencies.
Layton writes: "The report noted unexplained rising rates of some cancers in children and it referred to recent studies that have found industrial chemicals in umbilical-cord blood, which supplies nutrients to fetuses."
The panel further asserted, according to Layton, that health officials lack critical knowledge about the impact of chemicals on fetuses and children.
Stubborn political activists go so far as to assert weak chemical laws are deliberate for reasons not at all mystifying; rather it's strictly business, and health officials left uninformed in order to keep the medical profession and their perceptions away from the chemical industry.
The government's standards of safety as respects "chemical exposure" in the workplace is outdated for reasons hidden under our noses. As for the pollutants found in the air, food and water: in 2009 1.5 million Americans diagnosed with cancer with more than 1/3 perished due to the disease. (Who knew?)
The silence that has shrouded this information (and still does—why else a presidential panel?) seems extraordinarily hard to fathom; odd for a zeitgeist that prides itself on being self-revelatory.
Cancer-causing chemicals that people use every day serve as a mechanism that leads to the disease, also believed to be the genetic "time bomb" that alters human cellular growth later in life.
What politicians, corporate leaders and medical researchers have curiously little to say about is the reliable proliferation of new forms of the disease, its siblings arising out of the human condition closely associated with how we live.
The "war on cancer" is the business of cancer
The Frankenstein monster in all this is that the government must prove any chemical unsafe enough to remove from the marketplace with standards so high that even asbestos, a recognized carcinogen, is not banned in the United States.
Out of 80,000 chemicals used commercially in the country, only 200 (.0025%) have been assessed for safety. Any wonder there are more than 200 known forms of cancer, an amoeba mercurially splitting and multiplying?
And why the burden of proof so great? The chemical industry has a satellite office on K Street in Washington DC, among other lobbyists serving as an unofficial branch of the U.S. Congress. Lobbyists write the legislation that politicians sign into law on Capitol Hill. That is tradition, that is a fact.
What has grown up in the shadow of this equally familiar and peculiar constitutional violation is the multi-billion dollar "cancer business" endowed with medical institutions and research labs, doctors, nurses and staff; and those allied companies—not the least of which are the ones that make up the pathological weight of our pharmaceutical industry marked by a cool Draconian detachment.
There is no pill for cancer in all its forms thus far; and as far as I know, there is no normal emotional climate of humanness that clarifies how public good has become indentured to private greed.
David Brown's excellent Washington Post article, "War Against Cancer Has More Than One Target" dispels the disease as a single ailment. The "war on cancer" is like the war on terrorism with no one clear way to fight it.
Cancer is not an enemy where a single victory is even possible; cancer is legion with more and more types coming under the microscope, so peculiar as to confound researchers in particular and the medical community as a whole.
The sometimes chronic but more often situational disease is an affliction long-ago recognized as worthy of extensive research and, God help us, given its very own "institute". The National Cancer Institute (NCI) part of the federal government's National Institute of Health—adjunct to the Public Health Service of Health and Human Services—coordinates the National Cancer Program in research hospitals throughout the United States. (And, federally, as convoluted as the agencies that conglomerate Homeland Security).
At this point, could a cure for cancer entail anything less than a cure for life itself, at least as we now live it?
Sufficiently good at research, medical professionals pinning down types of cancer into categories grow unavoidably repetitive, as scientific findings at times seem spotty.
Looking at the disease in its own right, rather than what has become an ever-proliferating manifold of Machiavellian neglect, economic dependency on the "cancer business" with diffidence toward human life is the symptoms of big business brushing aside the human condition.
A generation will grow up confusing cancer deaths with "natural causes" while at pains to describe the for-profit industry of cancer with the federal government continually spending taxpayers dollars allocated for not-for-profit cures.
Beating cancer
I should point out confusion is endemic of cancer research, battling the disease on the false premise that we can win the war without a concomitant reduction of toxins produced by the chemical industry and unrelenting by-product of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.
Worse, cancer research is being sold on that slippery, gimmicky gambit of being curable, despite the persuasive intrigue that there are overwhelmingly manifest causes for the disease, requiring infinite panacea across a broadening horizon.
Given enough press and the inevitable supremacy of reason, the culture at large may come to know cancer as not a legitimate "natural cause" of death, but indeed perceive this "occasional illness" as the dire straits of a largely man-made Frankenstein monster.
An increasingly enormous gap between cause and cure notwithstanding, the cure for cancer requires feeding from a trough of investment. So much largesse involved, where then is the incentive to find a cure when "the search" is so lucrative...and profitability so great for as long as a cure remains elusive?
Beating cancer relies entirely upon the responding morality of human beings to improve the outcome of victims. Exterminating the disease by its branch and root is to take the profit out of those chemicals harmful to humans (and animals); which means removing the deadly toxins from the air, food and water and, in so doing, gradually curtail the need for remedial pharmaceuticals.
In the long run, of course, curing cancer will do more harm than good to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Then how can there be an honest "war" on the disease when the prospect of "peace" is not good for business?
I'm not suggesting that cancer research is at a loss or that in helping victims to survive their fate offers passing resemblance to keeping pharmaceutical companies out of the red. What I am saying is that we need to start seeing cancer in all its forms at its source. And what I'm asking is: How do we accomplish curing the disease without teasing out the demon responsible?
Finding "a cure" for cancer and winning "the war" against the disease is like turning off the oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico by throwing a switch. It's more a rheostat.
Research squeezed between corporate profit and loss (especially during this economic strain) will mostly have all the impact of a wet noodle beating a dead horse.
Between faith and fate...a miracle
People can talk all they like about the abstract data on cancer research but what it comes down to is saving our own lives. If we are killing ourselves, our children, and (with a slow-burning fuse) our children's children, the significant state of our being, at best, must rely upon spiking these proliferating types of cancer before they become a thousand and well-outside the reach for "a cure".
I know my own feelings and state of mind in helping my wife through that dark territory with an involved gaze of recognition that cancer research is imperfect, if improving; and the prognosis that millions more will certainly die within this decade as a matter of fate over stubborn faith that a miracle may help them prevail.
We found that miracle, a silent partner; and without putting too much emphasis on faith or prayer, the answer could be in the chemo treatments, the surgery cutting darkly at nodes, in all that data assiduously gathered to help explain "breast cancer"with the relentless sense of saving my wife from some far-off heaven, or losing her breasts here on earth.
Between faith and fate...a miracle, maybe?
Maybe, because in the end we found no cause for her cancer—the source of the disease eluded our excellent doctors.
So this memoir ends here; my wife "a cancer survivor" with an active and productive life in Washington DC.
And me, like any conspiracy nut...I'm just waiting to be right.
By Frederick Louis Richardson (@Spirit_Walking on Twitter.com)
© Copyright DreaMerchant ®2010 All Rights Reserved
May 9, 2010