This feeling in my stomach that won't go away, the news about my daughter's friend, trying to deal with how to get through all that the best way, talking to other parents, and today going to a counselling center to work through it, but still listening to the news a little (admittedly not following it as closely as I did before - but I think that what is going on in the world will also impact my children's lives, too, although the immediate impact on their lives is the situation with Emily), and so I wonder about a meetup group I joined not long ago designed to network with other like-minded people to get informed and inform others about what it going on in our country that is so wrong, but I keep thinking now is not the time for me to be away from my family and the community of people dealing with the potential loss of Emily to take on the problem our nation faces, as if little old me can really make a difference to our country but I can in our community, and God damn it, isn't that why our country is heading in such a wrong direction in the first place that the local communities are not the primary source for our dealing with issues, as our Founding Fathers had intended?
P.S. Thanks for letting me vent here, it is somewhat helpful to express my feelings.
The Z Platform
1 day ago
11 comments:
I thought you had said this in your blog but couldn't find it so it must have been an e-mail but you said doctors have given Emily anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. What I find puzzling about cancer is it doesn't kill right away, in some cases it takes a couple of years even so maybe that's what doctors should focus on. Does the rate of cancer growth slow down even in its spread and if I were a researcher I'd be looking at this mathematically, that maybe in these slower stages it can even be reversed. I remember shopping in the A&P and seeing the latest Nat'l Enquirer headlines about Patrick Swayze (any day now) and I saw scraps of that Farrah special and yet the days go on and both are still with us. Doctors' diagnoses are often wrong and we often hear stories of they've given Joe Shmo so many days or months and he surpassed all expectations. Put another way I think cancer is a very inexact science and maybe there's hope that some of these things aren't set in stone.
Here's what I mean. Under your blog of 6/17 titled "Why Pray?" you write:
"The youngest died after a year of diagnosis...The second was a boy who had just graduated high school and within about two years died."
Now cancer is basically out-of-control cell division but if it were out-of-control cell division all the time, 24/7 it would seem to me both these people would have died much sooner and that's the part that has always intrigued me about cancer, are there windows of opportunity to reverse the course? Two years or even one year is a long span of time for someone to be dying from a dread disease so it would seem to me there would have to be intervals where the cancer isn't doing much, then it seems to get reactivated again and so what causes that and so on and so forth. Does this make sense?
In Emily's case, she'd have some tumors shrink, then disappear, but one in particular that was too close to the heart to try to remove just never went away, then suddenly for no apparent reason just started growing very quickly. Makes no sense.
My next question was going to be what kind of cancer she has. Cancer is baffling and even seems to be diabolic at times, it almost seems to have a mind of its own. In my blue wave thread on the subject I posted that the cancer cells even use a camouflaging layer of mucus to fool, yes to actually deceive the body's own immune system into thinking nothing's wrong and so the bad cells wouldn't be attacked. It's like a real war going on, now how weird is that?
It started in her kidney but moved to the lungs and stayed there, never moved to the bones, which was always encouraging to her parents.
I still am hoping that somehow she does overcome the battle, and yes it is a battle, as long as she doesn't suffer and end up losing.
It's almost like an evil computer program at work, a worm within the body and I've read genetic engineering holds the real long-term key here, to actually reprogram the bad cells into normal ones again. Too often medicine has focused on hacking away at the problem in a literal sense which is necessary yes but until we understand it more it will keep recurring unfortunately. Why should a tumor disappear and then appear again? or the cancer to go away and then come back at a later date? There really needs to be a genetic/mathematical model for dealing with cancer and hopefully that's on the horizon.
I'm going to go now and check in tomorrow and Emily is in my prayers as you know.
Any discoveries now would be too late to help Emily, but I do hope you are right that the future help for others can be unlocked. I will keep volunteering with the Relay for Life, and also if Emily's family continue their charity to raise money for pediatric research, I will continue to help them at that, too, to try to make more cures a reality.
Let's try that again.....
Some forms of cancer have pretty good cure rates while others don't. I have absolutely no clue as to why. I wonder if there was less profit in it, if maybe there would be many cures by now. Just me being cynical I guess. I'll jump on the prayer bandwagon for Emily too Beth.
I'm cynical by nature too. When Nixon famously declared a War on Cancer there was alot of optimism and yet we've been studying this disease for over three decades now and seems to me anyway we should have it beat by now. I still hold out faith in miracles and had some other thoughts last night spawned by your recent Why Pray? blog. Why don't serial killers or Ahmadinejad for that matter come down with these things? The worst or most evil people always seem to be in the best shape and it's the little Emilys of the world who suffer. Your questions about God are really legitimate just to let you know even if we disagree to some degree.
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