Cancer

What is it about cancer that so petrifies us? 

Cancer has been like death sentence for many people. Azra Raza, an oncologist with special interest in myelodysplastic syndrome, wrote a book to tell the stories of men and women facing death. I learned about Omar Azfar, a thirty-eight-year-old graduate of Oxford and Columbia, who fought his battle with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder.

After many aggressive chemotherapy slash-burn-poison cycles, radiation therapy, and multiple lung surgeries, he decided to go to Greece for his honeymoon. He didn't want to tell the doctors, and never complained throughout the trip despite the cancer pain. He never lost the life of the mind. Instead of coming up with a list of the hundred books one must read before dying, he had shared with Azra Raza his list of a hundred books that one must read in order to live.

Azra Raza was devastated by Omar's death. The main theme of her book, The First Cell, is to avoid what is known as "group think", when the majority of oncologists have been striving to chase after the last cancer cell. Surgery to remove half of Omar's shoulder, arm and chest. Cisplatin, ifosfamide, and unpronounceable experimental monoclonal antibody like robatumumab. None of them were able to kill the last cancer cells of Omar.

Azra Raza thinks of the first cancer cell instead of the last cancer cell. That's a quantum leap. She reminds us that the best way to fight cancer is not to target the last cell, but to detect the first cancer cell. She pulls back the curtain on the holy grail of tackling cancer. The goal should have been to detect the first cancer cell's footprint, to find every cancer at the earliest precancerous stage. 

The last cancer cell rarely happens (or matters). The first cancer cell does. I think for the thousandth time how much we owe Azra Raza for her first and last duty to the cancer patients.