Cancer in remission does not always stay in remission. Volcanoes are still bubbling just beneath the surface. Are we doomed to suspect, for the rest of our lives, that what plagues us now can still hurt us in the future?
My views on hope and faith are changing this year. I'm still clinging to the romanticized version of "hope" I read about in my LIT classes, but the edges of that vision are becoming hazy. Do we hope that things will change or do we make them change? We (the royal we that encompasses teams of scientists) cannot cure cancer, but we're still trying. Hawaii is riddled with hot spots of volcanic activity, but still they linger around the mouths of danger in one of its truest forms.
Is it hope that keeps the numbers crunching in cancer research? Is it faith in the small advances we notice about our relationships that keep us holding on?
All I know is that we don't have a cure for cancer yet and volcanoes are still shooting ash into the air. I believe in hope still, but for some things, I'll feel better when I see a cure.
If we're basing our generalizations about life on historical influence or current examples, historically, millions of people have died from cancer in comparison to the few hundred thousand that have survived. Does that small percentage of survivors count as a glimmer of hope? When an earthquake devastates California, it just rebuilds itself- does that count as an example of rebuilding, and thus some desperate hope that it won't happen again for at least a decade?
Comparing a relationship to cancer is perhaps a little extreme, but sometimes it feels similar to walking around a fieldhouse track for 12 hours; something that Relay for Life suggests as a good representation of a cancer victim's daily struggles. I suppose the hope in this example is that somehow, whether we survive or not, the walking must end. The victim of cancer will live or die.
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