Friday the 13th

I’m told that the number 13 is considered a bad omen due to Judas being the 13th disciple. Whatever the case we’ve all found it ironic that today would be the day that my wife is in the hospital to have her cervix removed. After an abnormal pap the word carcinoma came up on the phone and our medical quest began. Judas is traditionally considered the disciple who turned on Jesus, cancer is when your biology turns on you. Maybe there’s a justification for Judas libel but history doesn’t give us much information.

My first thought after brief discussion with my wife was that cancer cells don’t mean you have cancer. That is to say most people develop and take care of cancer many times during their lifetime. Its biology is just beginning to be understood and to give you an idea of how archaic our technology is in most cases you have cancer becomes what we’re doing now. Cut it out immediately and pray.

100 years from now how we treat cancer will be looked at as the dark ages. I find it ironic that I was reading The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil at the time we found out about the diagnosis. In the book he’s discussing the point at which technology expands so rapidly that man and machine fuse, the expansion of knowledge becomes so strong that humanity as we know it might not even be considered humanity any longer. Go and watch the Terminator series of films and then the Matrix. See how it all goes bad? Well to Ray Kurzweil it’s the opposite, it all goes good and disease, decay and even death itself is banished.

Gene therapy hasn’t been developed and since we don’t yet know how to turn off cancer, cutting it out seems to be the treatment of choice. Kurzweil believes that our smart phones will slowly be integrated into our own bodies, you’ll have google maps at a glance in your head and the decay of telomeres which control aging will have been vanquished. To make a long story short, everything gets better and machines will slowly integrate into us. The line between man and machine will vanish and we’ll spread out into the universe…forever. Sounds like heaven right?

Remember my wife is scared shitless about to have part of her body cut off. I put my hand on my forehead considering what Kurzweil promises is around the corner and where we’re actually at. I also remind myself that in the documentary Transcendent Man Kurzweil goes through open heart surgery. You see, he as much as anyone else is hoping the technology comes sooner rather than later. No one wants to exit a week before the Singularity gets here.

So it’s Friday the 13th and yesterday we found out that a long time friend passed away from cancer. She’d been battling for a long time and leaves behind a family and daughter less than a year old. Hearing of her passing the day before my wife’s surgery isn’t fun. Did I mention I also left a clients home to realize I’d only been left one shoe? Don’t worry, it’s replaceable just been a few odd days.

Carissa or Reesa as she’s known to friends and family was my age. She fought over the course of time and had peaks and valleys while her family does what everyone with a sick loved one does, go through a huge range of emotions and deals with life at that moment. Andrea and I are now dealing with the same. My only real security is that my wife and I have had our relationship in such a way that if we got hit by a bus on the way over to the hospital we’ve loved each other and expressed that love in a way that doesn’t leave regret. If one of us goes the other doesn’t have any ill feelings about how we’ve interacted with each other.

That’s not a cure for cancer but it’s the best we got.

I’ll be blogging through the day to take up time while at the hospital. I’ve got a pillow, a blanket, smart phone (not yet installed in me but Ray Kurzweil would say it’s coming soon) and a copy of Eric Schiffmann’s Moving Into Stillness.

Keep in touch, I’ll be posting and blogging through the coming days. Want to help? Schedule a massage in the future, come to a yoga class and share these or other blog posts and videos from my youtube channel. The more advertising I get, the more exposure and healing had and our family doesn’t worry where the rent comes from while Andrea recuperates.