Living life means living with the risk of cancer. It is interesting to contemplate how the cards are dealt even as we try to outwit fate.
PUBLISHED December 02, 2019
Felicia Mitchell is a poet and writer who makes her home in southwestern Virginia, where she teaches at Emory & Henry College. She was diagnosed with Stage 2b HER2-positive breast cancer in 2010. Website: www.feliciamitchell.net
Cancer can be capricious. Its mechanism involves nature and nurture, oncogenes and proto-oncogenes, fate and bad luck. Even without testing, we can learn some risk through family history. The thing about a risk, though, is that the genes may or may not follow through.
Of course, if cancer is likely, there are things we can do but sometimes the things we do are a way to trick ourselves into feeling that we are in control. Sometimes we are in control, as when a woman chooses to have a prophylactic mastectomy or oophorectomy. Sometimes we are not, even with the best of intentions.
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