Yesterday I looked through my Cancer library (yes, I have a lot of cancer books) and I pulled down the book, “Anticancer: A New Way of Life” by David Servan-Schreiber.
Servan-Schreiber was one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and an accomplished neuro-psychiatrist. At age 31 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His book is about what he learned about cancer, and cancer treatment and cancer prevention.
Some of what he has to say is not new: the importance of exercise, diet, alternative treatments etc. But what is new is his description of roles we play in CancerLand-the patient’s role in his/her own care versus the doctor’s role. He also gives great guidance on how to sort medical info, nutritional info and he writes a lot about the physiological impact of stress. And the stress of cancer. He’s got lots and lots of facts.
But here is the fact that blew me away: “One hundred percent of people have cancer cells in their bodies after the age of fifty.”
100% of us have cancer after 50. We all have cancer. In some people, it develops into tumors or conditions that become life threatening, in others it does not. But after age fifty we all have cancer cells in our bodies.
That’s wild and powerful information to process. It’s significant when you think about what it means to maintain your health but also relevant to cancer screening and tests for cancer. And it is especially a starting point for wrapping our heads around our consistent denial of mortality and death. Because here is the other absolute health statistic: 100% of us will die.
We all have cancer, and we will all die. That’s not great news, but it’s not terrible news either. There is a lot of freedom—and maybe a path to peace—in those facts.
Knowing that all of us have cancer levels the field: there are not two camps: the sick and the well. There’s just each of us in some stage of living and dying.
This makes me think of Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, “Wild Geese” in which she asks,
“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
