Five unpleasant facts about blood cancer
Valery Panyushkin, editor-in-chief of the portal "Such things"
Sometimes I give lectures. Popular lectures about blood cancer for people who are not professionally or personally connected with oncology, hematology, or even charity. It's just that the managers of some commercial company want to become bone marrow donors with the whole staff. Or students of a theater university want to put on a play about the fight against a deadly disease. So they call me to talk.
I tell them, and usually the five facts I give come as a complete surprise to the listeners. The world in which I live with these five facts, and the world in which nice, kind, sympathetic people live, but without these five facts, it turns out, these are different worlds.
Five unpleasant facts about cancer are as follows:
1. 100% of people will get cancer. It's hard to believe, so once again – all people! When I ask the audience what the probability of getting cancer is, people usually answer – 20% or 30%. But no. 100%! That's it! Every person who does not die earlier from something else will get cancer sooner or later. In each of us, several cancer cells appear every minute, and one day the immune system will not cope with them. Knowing about this, in my opinion, should change people's attitude to the problems of cancer patients. "It doesn't concern me" should, in my opinion, be replaced by "It concerns me unconditionally".
2. It is impossible to believe in cancer. This is also a fact. I have never met and my friends oncologists have also never met a single person who would immediately react constructively to the news that he has cancer. That is why you did not believe in the fact given above. That is why people do not allow the thought "what will I do when I get cancer?" And that is why it is difficult to mobilize people for a conscious, regular and systematic fight against this dangerous and inevitable disease.
3. Cancer cells are harmless. At least this fact is true for blood cancer cells. They are not toxic, not aggressive – they just are. And this is an offensive fact, it seems to me. My friend Professor-hematologist Alexey Maschan explains it this way. Imagine that you have a couple of rabbits in your apartment. They are cute and fluffy. But they multiply. And soon you have ten rabbits in your apartment. And then a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand... and a year later you're just suffocating to death from fluffy and harmless rabbits. In my opinion, this is very insulting.
4. Cancer ruins. This is not a medical fact, but an economic one. But this is a fact. Perhaps billionaires are able to recover from cancer without going broke, but I do not know in There is not a single family in Russia where someone would suffer from blood cancer, and this disease would not lead the family to ruin. Moreover, I do not know of any family where someone would be cured of cancer without the financial help of relatives, friends or charitable foundations. Cancer is ruining – it's a fact. And especially cancer becomes ruinous if unrelated bone marrow transplantation is required – the most common and most effective method of combating severe forms of blood cancer today.
5. Hence the fifth fact. Every year in Several thousand bone marrow transplants are performed in Russia. The number of transplants is growing from year to year. But in the twenty years since the first In the case of unrelated transplantation, the state has never paid for the search for a donor for transplantation. Never. Not a single patient. 20 thousand euros for the search for a donor, the patient must always find himself.
That's what I tell you in these popular lectures of mine. Cancer will definitely touch you. It is difficult and annoying to believe in the inevitability of cancer. But cancer will definitely happen to you, ruin your family, and the state will not help.
Only we can help each other. Tomorrow you or your loved ones will need help. And therefore, today, please help the wards of the Leukemia Foundation.
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25.04.2017