"I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it."
~ Vincent Van Gogh
Nor is it a perfect art.
Because I don't want to write about ruptured ovarian cysts or appendicitis, or the fact that modern medicine still doesn't have ALL the answers, I'm going to offer this, which has been posted to the Great Internet for you to view through your super-smart, hi-tech phone or gaming device or laptop or maybe even your TV or some other souped-up thingamajig:
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| Vincent van Gogh - Saint Rémy, June-July 1889. Oil on canvas. |
We live in two worlds now. The touch, see, feel real world, and the virtual world of floating ephemera.
Isn't it incredible that in today's far far advanced and highly invested world of technology—a world built of tangible hardware, computers, routers, towers, cables, satellites, and a vast and not so tangible infrastructure of protocols, signals, foreign languages, nodes, interconnected networks and other things that I will never understand—where at the touch of a small screen one is easily transported to a world wide web enabling access to nearly anything the heart desires, that such a world, a magical world, can exist while scientists around the real world still have not found a cure for cancer or other persistent disease and illness?
How is this possible? How is it that medicine has advanced as it has in the past half century or so, but we are still unable to fully understand the human body? Why don't we know why we have an appendix? We know it has no discernable function. We know it looks like a witch's mangy finger. But what's it doing in the human body? And why can no diagnostic instrument see mine? Why can't we walk into a box, have the body scanned, and walk out with a full diagnosis and remedy for the ailment? Is it funding? Where does all the money go? Is there more money invested in the tech industry rather than life science and research? Are people getting tired of donating to life science and cancer research, seeing little return on their investment?
It's infuriating. It's not all true though, at least not based on what I found here, reprinted from Nature Biotechnology. So medicine doesn't move as quickly as the virtual world (though I bet it moves quicker than my bowels). This, I understand. But medicine has made giant leaps as technology has advanced, so what I don't understand is how we can all talk to each other like this, how we can connect and maneuver and solve problems in this virtual world, while scientific and cancer research seems to make little headway.
And in the case of women, medical advancement seems much slower. (Every time I have that annual mammogram I think, If I were a man there'd be an easier—less painful—way than this.)
But I'm no expert. I'll tell you where I put my money (the little I have), though: medical research. And if I had to give up the internet in order for us to find a cure for cancer and other ghastly illnesses of the world, then I'd do it. Hell, I'd cut off my left ear.
I miss my dad. And Rich.
(All right, well, I guess I wrote just a little about the things I didn't want to write about. My apologies if this post seems a bit disjointed—I'm on a teensy-weensy bit of painkiller medication. Nothing serious, just the damn cyst. Or appendicitis. Who knows?)
