It is not easy for me to grasp “cancer” – the concept or the disease. I don’t feel sick, and yet I have cancer. It is only when I read the pathology reports that I begin to get some sense that there is something going on in my body that is alarming.
The cells don’t look right, with nuclei that are high grade, and micropapillary architecture showing frequent central necrosis. At the building block level, something is out of whack. Cancer is like an invader, and yet these are my cells that have begun acting differently and turned into something else.
When I first heard that cancer cells had been detected in my body, I thought that I was sort of like a tree with something else growing up the side of it, and eventually it would kill the tree if it were not cut off. Now I feel a little differently. The cancer feels more like it came from within me. Not that my environment – and all the hormone and pesticide laced food – does not play a part. It’s just that I don’t feel myself separate from my environment.
My environment and I are both the same life (if that makes any sense). I cannot hold myself apart from the world I live in, or protect myself from it. We are one.
