Oncos

Onkos Greek Theatre Masks. The originals were made of linen, these are stone representations.

The Greeks used an evocative word to describe tumors, onkos, meaning "mass" or "burden." The word was more prescient than they might have imagined. Cancer is indeed the load built into our genome, the leaden counterweight to our aspirations for immortality. But if one looks back even further behind the Greek to the ancestral Indo-European language, the etymology of the word onkos changes. Onkos arises from the ancient word nek. And nek, unlike the static onkos, is the active form of the word load. It means to carry, to move the burden from one place to the next, to bear something across a long distance and bring it to a new place. It is an image that captures not just the cancer cell's capacity to travel — metastasis — but also Atossa's journey, the long arc of scientific discovery  — and embedded in that journey, the animus, so inextricably human, to outwit, to outlive and survive.

From Emperor Of All Maladies Siddartha Mukerjee

Diary March 11

General sense of the impossibility of conceiving how difficult this is going to be. Like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - Damian Hirst

OMG time is shifting. And yet not at all. Long periods between dr’s appointments with too much to think about.

Organized all the stuff at school. I already Let important people know what’s coming.

Meeting Dr.  on Monday to discuss surgery

Meeting the memorial Sloan Kettering team on Thursday

Talked with Maria Bell, was pretty straight about how tough it going to be

Caught up with Robert Gero

Diary Saturday, February 27

First entry. The self consciousness of writing a diary is always daunting. It’s benefits clearly outweigh the self doubt of low self esteem. I’m especially sure it’s important to start keeping notes on what happens here and why. 

The thing that stands out the clearest is Dr M’s cavalier attitude when I asked him about the lumps in my neck. And he told me: “nothing to worry about, want to feel mine?” He told me something else about the lymph glands getting hard from age and not functioning as well. He asked if it hurt and I said a little, he said good because cancerous cells don’t hurt. Or something like that.

As this unfolds, I’m most frustrated by this. That was years ago, certainly during the Spring of 2016. I don’t want to sue him, but somehow I want to express my frustration and disappointment to him.