Cancer

One day, when we have long shuffled off our respective mortal coils, quite possibly from cancer, cancer will be no more. In the local health centre, the local GP will attach her next patient to a computer which which will give a diagnosis, within seconds. “You have cancer,” the GP will say. “I’ll write you a prescription. Take the tablets as directed and come and see me in four weeks. You should be fine by then.” Today, in far too many cases, cancer is a death sentence or at least feels like one.

Unless you are an antisocial hermit, it is not possible that cancer has not affected you in one way or another. You will know people who have had cancer, worked with them, been friends with them, gone to the football with them, been related to them. You may have had it yourself. It is the one word you never want to hear from a doctor. Unless it’s to say: “You haven’t got cancer.”

Cancer is no respecter of anything. You can be young with the whole world at your feet, you can be happy, successful and in the prime of your life, you can be setting out on what you hope will be a long and happy retirement. Cancer doesn’t care.

Cancer was the reason I never found religion. No supernatural God type character would surely spend six days creating everything, only to invent other things, like cancer, to destroy them again. What would the point of that be? Theists pray that they might be snapped up to Heaven when they pop their clogs, but hopefully later in life when they’ve played a full innings. But that doesn’t happen. It often feels like the good die young – you must have heard people say when people die young because God needed them upstairs PDQ, as if to say only bad people can live on Earth. To anyone who sees no evidence that there we might somehow survive our own deaths, this is the one shot we have.

Something like 370 people die of cancer in England every single day. Put that in context. A fully laden Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner carries 248 passengers. Then imagine something like five Dreamliners crashing in England every week and killing all the passengers.

There’s hope, of course. The science that gave us Covid vaccines will one day answer all these problems. The cruel diseases that wreck and cut short lives will one day be not just treatable but curable. Until then, enjoy each day as if it could be your last. You just never know what’s around the corner.