Cancer

[None of us have it.] But my friend at work, Larry, he does. I didn't know him before his cancer, so I don't know how's it's changed him, but he's kinda cool now, so he was probably even cooler before, right? So I just got off the phone w/Larry's wife (who works for an endodontist - root canal specialist) and was checking fb to see if she was on his fb page so I could 'friend' her (she's not) and got distracted by fb and wound up over here at Esquire.com, where I found Stephanie Lee's story, and these haunting words describing what happens when a scientist looks through the microscope at cancer, after having just viewed beautiful healthy cells:

"The cells will get longer and more crowded. Everything will become more chaotic." But he didn't even have to say it. The change was atmospheric as much as it was visible. A good neighborhood had given way to a bad one; a bucolic past had yielded to a dystopian future. A riot had gone on. The eggs of the epithelium had been stepped on, by pitiless boots; the bright colors of the smooth-muscle cells now swirled in toxic pools, the sheen of industrial aftermath. Stained indigo, the machinery at the very heart of the cells—the mitotic spindles that are the signature of cell division—were apparent, but they were also everywhere, like popcorn boxes after a matinee, part of the cellular debris, the litter of cells dividing so fast they die.

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