Dancing With Cancer Memoirs...The Nature of the Beast, Part II

I often wonder of the nature of cancer. It sometimes seems as if our bodies have deliberately turned against us. Normal cells remind me of ants or bees. These busy critters work together as a unit. They all have specific duties to fulfill, including protecting the nest which they are willing to die to do. Our cells also have specific jobs to do within our bodies, and if something goes wrong, they commit apoptosis, or cellular suicide to protect their nest, our bodies.

During the initiation stage of cancer, something (probably multiple somethings) manages to enter the cell, reach the nucleus and damages the DNA, transforming the cell into something deadly to our bodies. They strike out on their own, becoming rogues, nomads, refusing to commit apoptosis. They seem to return to their ancestral beginnings.

And that happened around 3.5 billion years ago during the Proterozoic Era, when life on Earth was able to start. These early life forms were single celled organisms called photosynthetic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These were prokaryotic cells, meaning 'before the nucleus' which these cells lacked. They lived in a warm shallow sea called the Cretaceous Sea. It is thanks to these tiny critters that we have oxygen to breathe because they were able to photosynthesize, and a by product of photosynthesis is oxygen. Lucky for them predators had not yet evolved so they had the whole ocean to themselves.

They kept reproducing and spreading, eventually clumping together and forming structures called stromatolites. These stromatolites were eventually able to get pretty big.

Cancer cells behave much the same way after whatever substance manages to damage the DNA within the normal cell's nucleus. These damaged cells (now like cyanobacteria) quit working as a team with the other cells and strike out on their own, ignoring the command to commit suicide. They find a cozy place to nest (the right side of my colon in my case) and just start growing and dividing, unstoppable, until the tumor (the stromatolite) is discovered and somehow stopped. They will continue to grow and divide and spread, just like their ancestors, the cyanobacteria.