Five Days (2013)
“It was right there in front of me. As always, I found myself taking a sharp intake of breath as the realization hit: I am looking at the beginning of the end.
The cancer was shaped like a dandelion. Sometimes this sort of tumor looks like a cheap Christmas decoration – a five-and-dime star with ragged edges. This specific one was more like a minor-looking flower that had been denuded, stripped down to its seeds, but with an insidious, needle-like design. What radiologists call a ‘spiculated str...ucture’.
Spiculated. When I heard that word for the first time I had to look it up. Discovered its origins were actually zoological: a spicule being ‘a small needle-like structure, in particular any of those making up the skeleton of a sponge’ (I’d never realized that sponges have skeletons). But there was an astronomical meaning as well: a short-lived jet of gas in the sun’s corona.
This last definition nagged at me for weeks. Because it struck me as so horribly apt. A spiculated cancer – like the one I was looking at right now – might have commenced its existence years, decades earlier.MoreLess
The cancer was shaped like a dandelion. Sometimes this sort of tumor looks like a cheap Christmas decoration – a five-and-dime star with ragged edges. This specific one was more like a minor-looking flower that had been denuded, stripped down to its seeds, but with an insidious, needle-like design. What radiologists call a ‘spiculated str...ucture’.
Spiculated. When I heard that word for the first time I had to look it up. Discovered its origins were actually zoological: a spicule being ‘a small needle-like structure, in particular any of those making up the skeleton of a sponge’ (I’d never realized that sponges have skeletons). But there was an astronomical meaning as well: a short-lived jet of gas in the sun’s corona.
This last definition nagged at me for weeks. Because it struck me as so horribly apt. A spiculated cancer – like the one I was looking at right now – might have commenced its existence years, decades earlier.MoreLess
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