|
|
              
 |
Cancer Maps and Journeys
As a young boy, I was fascinated by maps. They conveyed a sense of wonderment, history and awe in me of the strange, far-off lands that many of them represented. I was taken in by the many different symbols, signs, legends, colors, the myriad of contour lines and curves, intricate drawings and pictures that cartographers have used over the centuries. I hoped one day to travel to many of the places I saw and meet and talk with the people — to listen to their stories, to hear their hopes and dreams.
Maps: South America, Amsterdam, The World, and Bergen. Click on any of them to see a larger image.
I could literally spend hours studying maps — whether they were simple road maps, topographical maps, demographic maps, political maps, scientific maps, economic maps, or picture maps. Any kind of map would do; it made little difference. Indeed, I must confess that even today, many decades later, I am still captivated by maps and stories about them. After all, maps tell the history of exploration, discovery and, in many instances, conquest. They speak of the many peoples of the earth without using words. Part of their power and magic lies in the fact that they are graphical and our eyes and mind must together fetter out the information and the stories they contain. Maps were (and still are) fundamentally important for trade, commerce, the deployment of humanitarian services and warfare. For many of us, they help us fulfill a fundamental desire to know where we live, who are our neighbors, what are the beautiful natural things nearby — in short, they give us some of the context we use in our ongoing attempt to understand who we are.
The most practical use many of us have for a map is to help us get where we are going. Therefore, it’s very reasonable, when confronted as a patient or caregiver with cancer, to attempt to locate relevant maps to help us find our way to a cure. But, we soon learn that there are no maps for our journey with cancer. Moreover, each journey is personal and quite unique. Walking down the same path doesn’t necessarily get each patient to the same place since a treatment that works for some patients may not work for others that have the very same disease. While some patients emerge to an opening where the “cure” lies within sight, others get trapped in a path that loops on itself, where the disease recurs. Or, worse yet, some travelers fall down a dangerous precipice into a place where the cancer has spread elsewhere in their bodies, making their journey increasingly difficult and, for some, increasingly painful. The patients don’t have maps. The caregivers’ don’t have maps. The doctors don’t have maps. It’s easy to get lost, frustrated, angry, depressed and to feel isolated and alone and like you've run out of options and to lose hope. The journey with cancer can have many detours and dead-ends.
For those sarcomas that are aggressive cancers, the journey must be made as quickly as possible. For some, the time allocated is not enough. As I daily read the stories on many of the online sarcoma support groups about those making the journey with sarcoma — a journey none of us ever intended to make — I am continually filled with hope as I see how so many patients travel on this uncharted, unmapped road with a courage and dignity that gives others inspiration to do the same. As I read the stories of the caregivers who are often emotionally and physically exhausted, I cannot help but be moved by the outpouring of love that they give attempting to help those on this journey as much as they can. Even if we had maps for the journey, hope and love would be indispensable along the way. And, as I read the stories of those who have lost a child, a wife, a husband, or a friend to sarcoma as we lost our daughter Liddy to Ewing's sarcoma, I know we must all work harder, quicker, and with more diligence to make maps that will help those who will face this disease in the years ahead.
In hope and peace,
Bruce
Bruce D. Shriver, PhD Editor-in-Chief, ESUN
PS: A brief postscript. Some of my favorite books about maps are listed below. I can highly recommend Ref. 1, “A Mapmaker’s Dream”. It is the story of a monk, Fra Mauro, who lives in a monastery on an island outside of Venice in the 16th century. Although he never leaves his cell, he attempts to construct a map of the world from the stories that visitors to his monastery tell him. I also recommend Ref. 6 (the true story of a thief who stole rare maps from several different library collections), and Refs. 9, and 2, in that order.
Some Favorite Books About Maps
V3N1 ESUN Copyright © 2006 Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative.
|
