Tumours galore

Took my cousin to Ely cathedral yesterday – about twenty minutes by train from Cambridge. The cathedral turns out to be the site of a shrine to St Etheldreda. She died of a throat tumour (around one thousand three hundred years ago). I couldn’t believe it. It seems I can’t get away from tumours even on a bleedin’ day trip. Anyway, her story takes a turn when they exhumed her body some years later and found that the tumour had healed and her body was well preserved….hmm. Read more about her here.

Remaining with religious personages, I find the blow by blow account of the pope’s deteriorating health rather distressing. Usually when a celebrity snuffs it you don’t get this detailed account of the last stages. You simply hear that they have died and the cause. With Pope John Paul however we are getting a full medical account of the last moments of his life. Stuff about renal failure, other major organ failure, septic shock, cardio-circulatory collapse etc. You have a bishop addressing a press pack telling them about the pope’s severe breathing difficulties and that he has never seen him in “such a state” and then you get the gobbledegook about how “lucid and serene” the pope is. Its all tied up with the church’s thing about affliction and suffering no doubt…..I find myself distressed and riveted at the same time. Distressed because the powerlessness of these hours is awful and riveted because I have often contemplated – in recent days – how one actually cops it with cancer. And it can be as above. Cancer can cause major organ failure and then you have the associated problems and then you are finished.

What a cheerful post I have managed to write.