Time for a "War on Cancer"

I've had it with cancer.

Like most people, I've always had a certain animosity towards the disease, but it's been building recently and Tuesday the camel's back received the straw that it just couldn't handle.

I was at Madison Elementary, tutoring a kindergartner on her letter sounds when it happened. This adorable little girl, Sofia, noticed the black bracelet on my arm and asked me about it. These rubber "cause" bracelets have become kind of cliche, but this one was given to me by a mother who lost her daughter to meningitis at the National Meningitis Association conference last year, so there's plenty of compelling reasons for me to wear it: 1. To honor Rachel's memory (if you're in the mood for a good cry, check out this tribute video some of her friends made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBDTu6uUdNY

2. To give me a reality check every time I start feeling sorry for myself because my hands look weird or because I can't play basketball any more. I was one of the lucky ones.

So I explained the bracelet to Sofia and I watched as this always-vibrant and sometimes even annoyingly energetic 5-year-old suddenly turned as serious as I'd ever seen her. "My auntie died too," she said. "She had cancer. The doctors couldn't help her." As is common with kids that age, her emotions suddenly swung the other direction and she flashed a giant smile as the rollercoaster went back up: "I have a big family," she said. "I still have lots of aunties and cousins." Then the rollercoaster crashed back down: "But I miss her."

That was when I decided I just couldn't stand cancer anymore. It needs to be wiped off the face of this planet as soon as possible. It frustrates the hell out of me that there's so little I can do about it.

Cancer took my maternal grandfather long before I ever got a chance to know him. It left my Grandma a widow in her mid-40s. Sometimes me or my brothers have asked her about marrying again, but she always just says that burying one husband was hard enough. She doesn't want to risk going through that again. After almost 40 years, the wounds are still raw. When she hears glowing reports about the Mayo Clinic, she gets bitter. "They couldn't save my husband," she says. There's a heartbreaking echo between her words and little Sofia's: "The doctors couldn't help her."

Several other more distant relatives have also fought or are still fighting cancer. I guess I could say it runs in my family, but I think we're probably not that far out of the norm. Either I'm getting more aware of all the cancer around me, or it has become oddly common.

My friend Jess lost an eye to a rare form of it a few years ago. She thought she had it beaten, but it came back and she just recently had another major surgery to remove facial tumors. She just wants to be a regular college student and instead she has to worry about surgeries, pain and insurance. If you'd like to help her, go here:

http://jessicaroark.org

Of course, she's not alone. Several walls at Madison feature fliers about Ryan Prow, an eight-year-old boy with relatives at the school who is being treated for Ewing's Sarcoma. Imagine that for a minute — being eight years old and going through regular chemo and radiation. When I was eight I thought it was a tragedy when I fell off my bike and skinned my knee. Ryan's family is holding fundraisers to help pay for his care as well.

My friend Sarah, who works with me at Madison, recently lost a young family friend to cancer. My friend Matt, who I lived with in Olathe, recently sent out a prayer request for this friend who recently learned she has cancer:

http://future-and-a-hope.blogspot.com

These are young, vibrant people. We need to do something about this.

I know money is very tight right now, and the words "government spending" seem to send a certain portion of the U.S. population into a frothing rage, so here's my zero-sum proposition: The Department of Defense's budget was $500 billion dollars last year, which seems obscene in a time when we have few real threats to our national security. Calling Al-Qaeda a real threat is giving it too much credit. As I pointed out in my earlier post, those guys aren't evil geniuses and the reality is, there aren't really that many of them. There is no threat out there that even remotely compares to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, yet we keep buying tanks, fighter planes and weapons of mass destruction at a ridiculous rate. And the irony is, these weapons aren't even particularly effective against terrorists.

So why not take half of that $500 billion and put it toward cancer research, prevention and treatment? How many more lives could we save with $250 billion to fight cancer? I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out.

That's the best I can come up with. Anyone else have any suggestions?