For the past few years a dear friend has battled cancer.
(I know, I know. A lot of people don’t like “battled”. It suggests that if you die of cancer you were a loser, which is an ugly value judgment that is not intended. But “struggled with” cancer seems weak. I “struggle with” keeping my crisper drawers clean. I am happy to use a better word if someone has one, but I can’t think of anything that encompasses the horror, pain, exhaustion, and demeaning and dehumanizing slog that attempted to rid oneself of cancer entails.)
It was a terminal and rare blood cancer, which required many months to just diagnose, and many more to find a bone marrow donor. (Another aside: register to donate your bone marrow, please.) To skip to the end: the transplant was successful, and she is cancer free. Hooray!
When she was able to announce to everyone that she was in remission and could talk about her future again, many people said this,
“Thank God! That is truly a miracle!”
I was fairly close to the process and got to see the hospital rooms and machines and doctors, and I can tell you, it was no miracle.
It was a science! To paraphrase “The Martian”, they scienced the shit out of my friend. They scienced her blood and her DNA. And before they did that, they did experiments to see if you could take the middle of one living thing’s bone and, after irradiating (also science) another living thing’s bones, put the new bone marrow in it and see if it would grow, even though the DNA of the new bone marrow is completely different than the DNA of the recipient. And damn it all, they can!
It was also a human! Humans did lots of research, and given the nature of research, persevered through lots of failure, to figure out how we make our blood, what our blood is made of, how to kill a part of you but leave the rest of you, how infection and immunity work, and a hundred thousand other points of knowledge that came together to make this possible.
A human on another continent also agreed to participate in a medical procedure to donate a part of himself so a lady he’s never met, who does not speak the same language he does, could have a life to get on with.
Thank God. Yes. There is no more appropriate response to this than overwhelming, tears-in-your-eyes gratitude. I cried like a baby in my office, because I love my friend and a future of wedding planning and other adult tasks I “struggle with” seemed terrifying without her. But also thank science. And people, who thought up science, and then did a boatload of it to make this outcome. Because I feel pretty certain that without the science piece, she’d be dead.