Home Free
In an April 2nd column I wrote about my pending “battle” with cancer. I wrote then that I didn’t consider myself engaged in conflict against the disease:
If I had sorcerers instead of physicians, and if those wizards could conjure and embody cancer to stand before me, fists raised, then I’d fight – if that were the way to a cure. But I’m simply cooperating with the protocols. And may God’s will be done.
A couple of weeks later I was saying, “There’s nothing like being treated for cancer to finally make you feel sick.”
Before chemotherapy and radiation began on March 19, I hadn’t felt the least bit sick. But after seven Monday sessions of chemo and thirty (Monday thru Friday) sessions of radiation, I was sicker than I’d ever felt in all my 70 years: worse than the worst flu I’d ever had; worse even than the bad reaction I had when I got both cholera and smallpox vaccinations before an ill-fated trip to Asia in 1969.
But being “cured” of cancer is a tricky business because the disease has a way of “hiding,” which word I put between quotation marks because cancer has no conscious agency. It’s a dumb thing, although it’s not wrong to say it continues to stump some of the best scientists on earth.
Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .
