I have had 2 close friends and 2 close relatives diagnosed with aggressive cancers in the space of a year. All of them are under under 35, 3 of them under 30. I firmly believe that they are all going to make it.
For me, learning this was like the childhood experience of feeling the outlines of one's own skull through the skin, and realising of a sudden that one's beloved meat puppet, happily dancing on its bones, is not a permanent fixture of the landscape, this, or any other.
There is an odd feeling of dread, which quickly gives way to a rush of awareness that life, as it is, is a gift of sorts, and something that, if ignored, will go away by itself all too quickly.
It has not been enough to terrify me back into the stinking rat-holes of faith, that the religious have dug to shelter them from the terror of the daylight.
I rather commit myself afresh to making my life, and those of my loved ones, as much fun as possible.
