Oncology, It grows on you…
My ambition in life is to become an oncologist. Yes, that is a doctor who deals with cancer, I’m not mistaken and think that it is a job that is always ‘rainbows and butterflies’ as a popular song goes. My mother thinks that oncology is one of the dullest sectors of medicine that I could choose to go into.
“The people are DYING.” She told me exasperated after we spent about twenty minutes going through a list of medical books that interested me (about oncology).
Me: “Exactly.”
Eventually the scientists will have everything figured out. i doubt that it will be during my lifetime, but one day they will realise how the world began, or why when you divide and divide a particle at the centre there is energy. But death, that is something that science will never be able to definitively understand because they cannot systematically observe it and experiment with it.
Death is the great equalizer, I very much agree with this. In death, it doesn’t matter how you lived, or how much money you had, your body is breaking down and you are learning exactly what it means to be human. (Funny commercial about being human here I met this guy at a dance convention and took class from him. He looks better in real life.) When you’re faced with your own demise, it’s strangely refreshing, because you have nothing to lose. You become the person that you always dreamed to be.
I later told my mum that I wanted to help them die. But I said this incorrectly. I’m not a Dr. Kevorkian supporter or anything like that. i’m not looking to help people kill themselves. I just want to be the person there to help them be 1. comfortable, and 2. in a good environment when they do die. I want to be around them while they are dying because then perhaps I will be able to better understand what is eventually going to happen to all of us.
Ok, so I’m obsessed with death. But who, secretly, isn’t? We all want to investigate the things that we don’t understand. As humans we are all instinctively curious. They say “curiousity killed the cat,” but what was it like for the cat as it died? That is what I want to know.
Cancer, itself, we understand quite well. It is an overgrowth of cells in one area. well, that does sound terribly boring when you put it that way. But it isn’t the cancer that makes oncology so intriguing, it’s the ambience and the situations that come up because of the cancer.
So, there you are, my mum isn’t right for once, there is more to oncology than just a certain Robert Sean Leonard.
~kiki
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