Can’t beat cancer

Editor, The Commercial: A candidate recently announced having undergone surgery to remove a cancerous organ, proudly proclaiming she had “beat cancer.”

Wrong. Fought it to a stalemate, perhaps, or she came out ahead on the first round, but she didn’t beat it. The only surefire way to “beat cancer” is to die of something else first.

Cancer never gives up. It is persistent; it is tenacious. It is quite capable of conceding one battle, only to retreat, regroup, and reappear years later.

I know of what I speak. It afflicted my father and six of his siblings (in seven different varieties). It claimed two of my own siblings, as well as my beloved wife. If there is a cancer gene, we have it; if it’s airborne, we live downwind.

It is a foregone conclusion for many of my relatives. A distant cousin recently successfully completed treatment for lung cancer and was declared cleared, eight years after having successfully completed treatment for lung cancer and being declared clear. He understands now.

Not so long ago, it was considered gauche, almost uncouth, to publicly admit any such illness, the “Big C” or otherwise. It was seen as a weakness, meaning if a person was not healthy, they were not fit. (No newspaper would run a photograph of F.D.R. in his wheelchair.) That held true until Rock Hudson, though it was later codified in a way in federal patient privacy laws.

“Cancer is a killer” was the mantra of many medicos of the past. It still is, but it is just one of many. It no longer is an automatic death sentence. Modern medicine has made many inroads into its treatment, many detours around that final outcome. It still lingers in the background, though, waiting … ever waiting.

Hucksters and hypesters plead endlessly for more money to find a “cure.” The joke’s on them; one has been found, discovered four or five years ago by two researchers working independently of one another, one in New England and the other in Scandinavia. Both discovered that the key was to dissolve the chemical shells by which cancer cells cloak themselves from the host body. Destroy those shells, and a body’s own defenses recognize the invaders, and move in to destroy them.

At the time that discovery was announced, the New Englander, working for Big Pharma, was preparing to launch human trials. The Scandinavian, working solely for the betterment of mankind, was trying to find a couple million dollars to do so.

Soon thereafter, they were heard from no more. Apparently, there is more money to be made from treating than curing, and little interest in a Susan G. Koman Race for the Heck of It.

I paid my dues to my heritage this summer, with five weeks of daily man-zaps on Bobo Road. (Thank you, SuSu, for the pleasant diversions.) Main course OK; sides not; no soup for me. I rang a bell after the last visit.

So much for my couth, but I didn’t beat anything.

D.H. Ridgway,

Pine Bluff