Is Cancer Becoming Indispensable?

Going with the recent turn of events, cancer is a catastrophe to reckon. Everywhere I walk, people are speaking about it. It is now becoming a sure thing that you are dying soon if you got this monster with you. At the end of the day, you will die from the stigma getting attached with cancer at the moment rather than dying from the disease itself.
When I excused myself from a friend two weeks ago to go home and be in time for the prime time news because of some interest I had for that day, I remember him vividly remarking that the news for the day was about the rich and ‘their’ diseases.
What he meant was that the news was going to be purely based on cancer. To him this is a disease of the rich. That it had become an urgent thing going with the fact that we had lost a few high profile individuals to this terrifying disease. First it was Bob Robert Collymore, the CEO of Safaricom. Then Ken Okoth the Mp Kibra and most recently the Governor of Bomet, Dr. Joyce Laboso. All these deaths happened within a close span of time and ended up becoming a wake up call that the disease of the west had caught up with us.
Sometimes back, everybody kept saying that cancer was a disease for the whites and while we concentrated being ‘amused’ at them without looking at our lifestyle, the disease knocked at our doors. We now have to focus on ways to abate the disease from wiping our people out or rather wiping us out. But that is not the case with us. Why am I saying that out? Because none of our leaders ever sees the urgency of us having well equipped cancer centers in the country.
All these high profile deaths happened after these guys went to seek treatment overseas. Perhaps their insurance was able to cater for the hospital bills. That is fine but what about the poor? We who cannot afford the decency of life itself. It thus means that there are a lot of our people dying at their homes because they cannot afford to go and seek proper medical care even within the country itself.
Take the case of Bob Collymore for instance which was a misdiagnosis from the very beginning. The disease was not detected early on which gave it time to develop to advanced stages. Later, he went to seek further medical treatment only for him to realize that it was a case of cancer at an advanced stage. Even for Ken Okoth, the disease was detected at a relatively advanced stage.
What this means is that our medical systems and practice is either irrelevant or ignorant of the fact that medical treatment and detection has gone to a whole new level. Our health system needs a complete overhaul so that we have advanced technologies to detect diseases at a very beginning. Our medical practitioners too need to be thoroughly trained to rise up to the occasion always.
This is the most strategic time when our legislators need to be charged up to push for setting up proper cancer centers in the country to help address this disease that everybody is all of a sudden calling out that it should be declared a national disaster.

It becomes interesting to note that the disease is looking indispensable now that it has killed high profile people in our society. All along when our politicians have attended burials of cancer victims in villages, it didn’t look a matter of urgency because these burials are of common citizens. At the end, the need to politic overrode the drive to help them address the misery of the citizenry.
And in as much as I have written about the government and the need for our health sector to address the cancer problem, there is a huge role to be played by each and every one of us. We need to monitor our eating habits as well as general lifestyle practices. We don’t need to eat everything that our hands find to eat because intemperance in regards to appetite is very wrong.
Secondly, we ought to be very keen to exercise. We are so much used to eating and sitting idly. We are a driving nation and walking or even jogging is a no go zone. We eat and become obese and then begin to look at things from a bleak point of view. There is nothing hard like telling an obese person to exercise because to them that is like a mountain to climb.
We also consume a lot of processed unnatural foods daily, right from morning to evening. I remember back in the day, when I was in the village, it was known that those of us who ate vegetables a lot were the poor. We measured the affluence of families by the meats, breads, milks, sweets, sugars and all the pleasantries they munched. Now you can imagine eating all these without exercise and moderation. A very fertile ground of diseases.
Let’s learn to eat a lot of natural foods. A lot of vegetables and plant based foods with lots of water and enough exercise is the way to go. Cereals, tubers, fruits, greens, seeds and all the likes are the ideal foods for this generation. Though they need first to be checked for quality as well.
Lastly let us have proper registration on the quality monitoring of the foods that we consume in regards to the chemicals added as well as the preservatives. Let us eat real fresh foods and not those that have been enhanced.
It is high time we all came together to fight this common enemy. Trust me, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Let us hold our hands and together say “Not Anymore cancer.”
End.
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