Channeling Emerson

One of the first questions to strike me when I found out I had Hodgkin's was why? shortly followed by how? I asked the oncologists whether cancer had been lurking inside me, a ticking time bomb waiting for an unknown trigger, an inevitability. No - the docs estimate I developed cancer sometime in January.

So mentally I cut back to January and try to recall just what it was I was doing that was unwittingly causing cancer. All I can remember are the standard routines: trying to stay warm in the Boston winter, waking up in the dark to drag myself to the gym, enjoying a little too much Primo's pizza from time to time.

There's no known cause of Hodgkin's, and besides being in my early 20s, I have none of the risk factors. It affects mostly males, and individuals with compromised immune systems from HIV or the Epstein Barr virus. Because of this I've developed this secret fear that someday the cause will be discovered and it will reflect on some specific and pretty embarrassing aspect of my life. For example, I've always taken the expiration dates on food as very loose guidelines, and I do recall eating some seriously freezer-burned ice cream; was that in January? And I never use umbrellas in the rain...does that cause cancer?

The thing is that if I weren't crazy enough already, this kind of thinking would drive me up the wall. As a great man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once said, "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can...This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays." It is however, very important to admit that I read this quotation in a book about cancer while obsessively trying to research what caused mine back in January.