Last week, we lost another friend to cancer. Vona Pumphrey was 64. She lived healthy--really healthy. If anybody could live to a ripe old age through meticulous attention to diet, and holistic regimens, it should have been her. But it doesn't work that way.
About a week before that, another good friend, Jon, lost his Dad. He was scheduled to have brain surgery to remove a mass, something went wrong, he suffered a perforated aneurysm and died a few days later.
It feels like cancer is everywhere, in everybody, snarling and pacing, just waiting for somebody to leave the latch on the cage undone. Really, I'm sure it seems so prevalent mostly because people don't die as often of flu, consumption and gangrene in their 20s and 30s anymore. So we just get better opportunity to watch the flaws in our genetic code in painful slow motion. I fretted over the big-C since I was a little kid when my grandfather died of it. Now I think about it and find myself touching the lump behind my collarbone, wondering if the old scar tissue has changed size any. Worrying doesn't do any good, as they say. It just makes things worse. Yeah, yeah. I'd need shock therapy to wipe out that little self-destructive thought process. I just have to convert it to sassiness on a regular basis.
Hi Jeremy:
I've lost 2 people in the last 6 months to cancer, and of course, the scare with my mom. It's a despicable disease... I hope, hope, hope there's a breakthrough soon and someone figures out how to kill cancer... Till then, I'll be sending my checks to the ACS... Keep yer chin up.
Sue
So familiar is the comment "and find myself touching the lump behind my collarbone, wondering if the old scar tissue has changed size any", that it flooded my soul with those memories. And I know how you feel, it seems not so many days go by that there is not a cancer within my vision.