Lux et umbra vicissum…

Have you ever wondered why an illness that isn’t inborn can be so hard to kill?  If you think about it, most sicknesses that you pick up along the road of life are usually fought off by our own immune systems, sometimes with the help of drugs like antibiotics.  There are a few obvious exceptions, of course – immune disorders that are contracted later in life, for instance – but in general, contractable diseases are also fightable diseases.  So why is cancer any different?

Though cancer isn’t something that spreads from person to person (for reasons I’ll mention later), it’s also not something innate.  Oh, we may be born with a predisposition to it, but the actual disease isn’t a chronic condition that we inherit from conception.  This means it has to come from somewhere, so where does it come from?

All sorts of things are blamed for causing cancer, some of them with more factual foundation than others, but the basic source of the cancer is our own cells getting a little too creative.  Have you ever heard the statistic that our body replaces every cell with a new one in a seven year cycle, so after seven years you’re basically a completely new person?  The statistic is actually bunk, but the idea of our cells dying off and being replaced is absolutely true.  You might remember the term “mitosis” from your high school biology class, it being the splitting of a cell into two “daughter cells” with identical genetic information to the original.  The problems happen when a cell emulates your basic teenager and says, “I’m bored with this whole copying over and over and over thing.  I want to be DIFFERENT!”  At that point, it gazes in the mirror at what it looks like and decides to distort the mirror a bit to produce at least one daughter cell that doesn’t quite look like it.  Voila!  It has created something special.  And very possibly cancerous.

Since these new cells are still technically part of our own genetic system, be it a mutated version, they can’t pass to another person.  Do you know how difficult it is to graft one genetically different thing with another?  Suffice to say, farmers, surgeons, and geneticists have to work pretty hard and fairly precisely if they want to do this.  Our cells don’t naturally do it on their own.  That’s the good news.

The bad news is that these naturally-produced cells also manage to evade or even convert immune system cells.   Though the immune system does help to fight many cancer cells, very possibly killing some off that most of us didn’t even know were there, some of the stronger cancer cells can strong-arm immature immune cells into actually helping them instead of killing them. In other words, the mutated cells become bullies and start to take over the playground.

I suppose you could say the cells are being “smart” when they react this way – who needs AI when you’ve got cells with their own creative bent? – but just like most bullies, their actions are only leading to their own demise.  Eventually, either through treatment or death of the host, the bully cells will die off, and it will be ALL THEIR FAULT.  No mercy here.  Just another illustration of why bullying is stupid.

So for those of us fighting cancer of any kind, we’re basically taking on the class bully, the kid who in wanting to be “different” or “special” chose the path of tyranny.  My biggest question here is this: why cancer?  Why can’t I have mutated cells that allow me to teleport or shoot lasers from my eyes (instead of maybe having to have them pointed into my eyes instead)?  Come on here, I need more X-Men and less Wrong Turn.  Is that really too much to ask?