The Langley Relay for Life is here, and with it a host of reasons to again support the cause of cancer research.
I was recently privileged to meet Jack and Malcolm Shields. Malcolm is busy racking up an impressive fundraising total for the Relay for Life as part of his elementary school team, in honour of Jack's fight with leukemia.
The good news is, Jack will likely win that fight.
He'll win because of countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been poured into cancer research in the last 75 years. Dozens of cancers have moved along a spectrum from always fatal, to mostly fatal, to 50/50, to treatable, to cureable.
Treatments are improving in ways that don't just extend life, they improve quality of life.
If you visit the TRIUMF particle accelerator at UBC, you might see cancer patients leaving. It turned out that one particular kind of eye cancer is susceptible to the sort of charged particles you can only generate when you have a couple of electromagnets the size of football fields.
Those patients previously would have been treated by having an eye removed; now they get to keep both eyes.
Other cancers would have required amputations and now do not, some cancers required painful surgeries that are now less invasive. Things change, one treatment at a time.
But not every cancer is cureable. Cancer is a hydra, cut off one head and another one, or two, or dozen, seem to grow in its place.
We've learned how to cut out cancers, we've learned how to zap them with radiation, how to poison them with chemotherapy. But some hide from the surgeon's knife, they resist radiation, they can't be poisoned.
The cancer that killed my father in 1995 wasn't amenable to treatment. It's still not, today.
This week, Scottish writer Iain Banks's novel The Quarry was published, about a man dealing with terminal cancer.
Banks was writing the last few thousand words when he went to the doctor about a sore back and was told he had terminal gall bladder cancer, and had just a few months to live. He died on June 9.
Banks is one of my favourite authors, with two distinctive fan bases. He wrote stories set in modern day Britain, and with the middle initial M., he wrote some of the most audacious science fiction of the last 30 years. He was a hopeful cynic, someone who could fill his books with humans (and aliens) who are quarrelsome, shortsighted, stupid, vicious, and violent, and yet make you believe that the universe was not all doom and gloom.
His main achievement was his novels about the Culture, a vast, galactic society that had achieved the closest thing possible to utopia. He picked away at his own perfect world, teasing out every flaw and questioning every assumption.
Just before he died, Banks said he was hoping to live long enough to actually write another Culture novel. He never got the chance. He was 59.
I hate cancer, I'm angry at cancer, because it cuts off thousands of futures. Banks draws attention because he had many fans, but it's no less cruel when cancer cuts short the life of a 10-year-old, or a teenager, a new mother or father, someone hoping to welcome a new grandchild into the world.
Relay for Life will pour money into the Canadian Cancer Society, which along with many other groups will fund research. It will find new ways to cross some more cancers off the fatal list.
Cancer research is a time machine, in a way. It lets people travel to the future, one day at a time. Donating to a cure is giving the gift of tomorrow.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter at the Langley Advance.
