Cancer is Marvellous

Cancer is Marvellous. It does admittedly have it's drawbacks, but it can do the impossible. I spent most of the second half of the 20th Century, firmly convinced, that although I knew a tiny number of people who deserved the accolade "human being", the vast majority of the population were really just wasting perfectly good oxygen. Greed, violence, misery and spite have not only become the norm, it seems to be what people actually aspire to. I'm not just talking about those who want to achieve at the expense of others - it's the ordinary folk who all just want. They want money, possessions, recognition, more possessions and everything seems to revolve around rights.

Everyone seems to believe that their "rights" are somehow God given and that they must claim their "rights" at every given opportunity. It gets worse all the time here in the UK but please do not get me started on the US! God knows how things will break down when the last remaining unqualified US citizen gets his/her law degree and there's nobody left to represent. Other than in real extremes, misery in our western affluent society is almost completely self imposed and inflicted. My attitude has basically been - if you are that unhappy with your lot just go. I don't mean, go abroad or go away from here I mean seriously GO. It didn't take the last few years living with screwed up cells to convince me that life is really a pretty damn good thing to participate in. You don't want to? Fine - quit, and for God's sake, when you're going - don't moan about it. O.K, having established my general view of value of homo sapiens I'll come to my point.

Cancer has let me find a much larger than expected number of people with whom I'm really happy to share the planet. Having done the maths, I know that if extrapolated world wide there would still only be enough of them to fill a pretty small cul de sac, but nevertheless it was a shock. I still think it would be sensible to nuke everyone outside this group of people but no doubt there will be detractors to that proposition. I've just come into contact with almost exclusively good people since my first diagnosis. I don't mean goody goodies, I mean down to earth, honest, caring, good.

I've talked about a few of them in other parts of this site but I'll give you another example. I was recently referred by my Macmillan alien to an occupational therapist. Never having had cause to think about this term I vaguely thought they were the people who rubbed deep heat ointment on injured footballers thighs. A brief scan of my mental database picked up the word physio in relation to the footballing function so I had to reclassify the ones of the occupational variety. A very affable lady turned up at our house to discuss how life could be improved bearing in mind my condition and prognosis. As the conversation went on she made some interesting observations and suggestions and I increasingly began to think that her visit was far from the waste of time I had feared.

I also began to gain the distinct impression that I would not like to be in an organisation which was standing in the way of her protecting the interests of one of her clients. Not without a pump action shotgun I wouldn't. Events following this meeting have confirmed to me that indeed, none of the local bureaucracies issue shotguns to their personnel. She is a wand waver.