Last November I held a seminar in Sydney, Australia. Afterwards, I rented a bicycle and blew off some steam on Down Under’s bike trails.
I’m tooling along in a spacious, sumptuous park in Sydney and receive a text from my friend, Bill Middleton. Bill is a long-time friend, client and confidant. His wife, Laura, is a fitness instructor, wellness coach and massage therapist. Not long ago, she did a splendid job organizing Bill’s 60th birthday party.
Bill’s group text included several other friends:
Hey guys, Laura’s got pancreatic cancer.
I stopped pedaling. Sat down under a tree. Called Bill. I’m thinking this is not good. My friend, Tom Hoobyar, died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago. It was harrowing and fast.
Your pancreas is a vital organ. When it goes bad, things get ugly quickly.
Then, in December, back home, I’m riding once again near Loyola Medical Center and I knew Laura Middleton had checked in. So I went to the hospital and hunted them down.
Laura was just starting treatment. Bill was trying to be strong. Christmas was drawing near. He tells me, “We're starting radiation and hopefully this will work.”
Most of us have ridden the cancer roaster coaster. My first ride was when my dad got cancer when I was fourteen. He died at 44. Cancer is a monstrous energy and money suck.
But we humans seem hardwired to climb on that coaster anyway. We can't help ourselves. Even if there’s just a “12% chance,” we lunge at it like a winning lotto ticket.
It's a “bleeding neck” which is why any business person can well understand why patients are so willing to throw stacks of money at a problem so formidable.
Back to Laura… she quickly went downhill. By February, they were discussing final arrangements.
On a Sunday morning in April, friends adorned in COVID masks held a social distancing prayer vigil for Laura on their front lawn. She passed away a week later.
Where we're at with cancer: If you catch it really early, three-fourths of the time you can knock it out. But if it gets to stage three or stage four? Your chances of survival are no better today than they were in 1930.
In fact, if I went to the doctor tomorrow and they said, “Perry, you’ve got stage three cancer,” I might try nutrition and holistic approaches. I would ask my friends to pray extra hard. But I’m not sure I would touch chemo or any of the conventional stuff with a ten-foot pole. Near as I can tell, they just make you miserable and extend your life by maybe… three weeks.
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This is why we need a Cancer & Evolution Symposium. And you know what’s funny... when we started inviting speakers, nearly every one we asked climbed on board.
People like George Church at Harvard, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential in 2017 - he might be the most famous geneticist in the world. And people like Robert Weinberg at MIT and Paul Davies from the Beyond Center at ASU.
It “shouldn’t” be easy to get people from Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Johns Hopkins and MD Anderson. But I think one of the reasons this came together so readily was they all know we might really be on to something big here.
Cancer is the #2 cause of death. And since cancer is “Evolution Run Amok” we needed to match the smartest cancer people with the smartest evolution scientists so we can get this problem knocked out.
Carpe Diem - Seize the Day.
Starts October 14. Register here:
