Chapter 4 – The cancer Pool
After finding out, we began our brand-new journey and we put our own unique twist on it. Remember, our fantasies about how life should be, about what we deserve, what we have a right to and what’s going to happen, are running hard and fast, more so now that they’ve been challenged.
She doesn’t look sick. She doesn’t look like she’s going to die. Why do we have to jump immediately into the cancer pool?
What is the cancer pool?
It’s the industrial ecosystem built around and for cancer in the United States. Industrial, meaning widespread, automated, hi-tech, mechanical, cause and effect based. Ecosystem, meaning the separate and distinct environment with very strict rules and protocols. We didn’t see this clearly six years ago. We see it clearly now. Six years ago, we had a layman’s view, today we have a professional view. Six years ago, we were defiant, ignorant, prideful, and deluded about life and our ability to influence it. Our anti-bourgeois impression of the medical establishment, the industrial cancer ecosystem was as jaded as it was innocent. We thought we knew better. We were sure we understood the fraudulent nature of big medicine, big cancer, big business. We were wrong. It’s way worse and unfailingly better than we ever thought. The cancer pool is the result of a collective caring, perhaps unprecedented in human history, to cure something that has taken so many lives. It’s also a disease in and of itself that has become so co-opted by greed and economics that it may be broken beyond repair.
The first thing to know about the cancer pool is that you never leave. If you jump in, you will die in the cancer pool, eventually. The “establishment” are honest about this, the cancer pool is not about healing. It’s about capturing more time to be alive and about making that captured time livable. This has been hard to grasp. What do you mean there’s no healing? What makes you so sure? How are you so sure that she’s going to die? What does it even mean to receive care if the care you are receiving has nothing to do with healing? That does not compute. That did not compute because I was not raised to contemplate and appreciate the certainty of death. I wasn’t raised like that at all. Take an aspirin and you’re good. Get some rest and you’re good. Get an operation and you’re good.
I don’t know if either of us realized about the cancer pool and what it meant to dive in. I don’t know if we realized that once she took that step, that was it. She was in the pool and the rules of pool applied. The main rule being you can never leave. What do you say to people who read results of high-tech machines in white lab coats while sitting in the office of a multi-million dollar building with others in white coats and clipboards all orbiting, there for you, with free coffee and rice Krispie treats. Do you say no to these people? Do you question the entire ecosystem? Some do, but not many…
We didn’t.
Well…hold on…that’s not true. We did question, she did question, and that’s part of the story…Edited 2/12/23
Edited 1/19/24
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