We All Have Cancer

I’m reading the new book, “Anticancer: A New Way of Life” by David Servan-Schreiber. He was one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and an accomplished neuro-psychiatrist when, at 31, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His book is about what he learned about cancer, cancer treatment and cancer prevention.

Some of it is not new: exercise, diet, alternative treatments etc. But what is new is his description of roles: the patients role in his/her own care versus the doctors. And how to sort medical info, nutritional info and much more on physiological impact of stress.

But this is the fact that blew me away: “One hundred percent of people have cancer cells in their bodies after the age of fifty.”

We all have cancer. Again: We all have cancer. In some people it develops into tumors or wild growth that becomes life threatening, in others it does not. But after age fifty we all have cancer cells.

That’s wild info to ponder in terms of prevention and what it means to maintain your health but it’s also a way to get our heads around our denial of death.

I think of Mary Oliver’s poem: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”