John in front of the screen
This day, Thursday the 10th of December, is the day that the weekly lecture at my school, EF International Language School in Oxford, is given by a guest speaker of CRUK. After about a month of e-mailing between me, CRUK and my school I managed to have one at my school. Normally the lectures are given by teachers, who are reluctant to do so because it has to last for 1 hour and 20 minutes and students easily get bored. Often they choose a very specific subject that they are personally interested in. I won’t blame that for that, I would do it myself too, but for others who have no connection or bond with it, it can be a bit tedious. I hoped that the CRUK lecture would avoid such a situation. Fortunately, when I met the speaker this morning, I met a compassionate man, called John. I was introduced to him by the academic advisor of my school and I made him familiar with Britonfolder. At the onset of the lecture I was asked whether I wanted to tell something about Britonfolder, but I rejected that offer as I thought it would be better to do it at the end. John started the lecture with an audience of 25 people. A bit disappointing, despite I hadn’t expected a big crowd to turn up anyway. However, John began to talk about general facts regarding cancer and his own experiences with it. His father, mother, grandmothers, brother-in-law and the most terrible, the 15-year old friend of his son, got all affected by it. Besides his father, they had all died. John had been a solicitor, he told us, and retired. These days, you can find him every Friday in the CRUK shop in Thame, doing the financial stuff involved in running a shop. His personal motives were obvious. Nevertheless, he also puts effort in giving lectures to inform people about cancer. I think this is very valuable and you can call John a philantropic person. He does something for other people in order to prevent having them suffer. Anyway, the lecture was about what the policy of CRUK is, what their aims for the next five years and for until 2020. At this moment, a quarter of the people under the age of 25 gets affected by cancer. In ten years, CRUK is determined to lower than to 20 %. That’s one of the many ambitious goals. Furthermore, John elaborated some very difficult medical issues which I had never encountered before. For example, have you ever heard of keyhole surgery? It’s one of the newest techniques to treat cancer. It goes like this: instead of ”cutting someone open’ the surgeon just makes a tiny gap in the patients’ skin. He then implements two ’claws’ in it together with a camera. The camera is connected with a big screen, so the medical team can see what happens inside. With the claws they can operate. It’s similar to what I’ve read in the Oxford mail about a superadvanced machine which was only available in an Oxford hospital which helped surgeons. They didn’t have to stand any more during an operation. They could sit and handle the device. Another word John mentioned and which catched my attention, was ‘ shotgun approach’. It is used to clarify the way surgeons used to treat cancer in earlier days. It’s called shotgun approach because of the similarities in precision ( but not ). Let’s say you want to shoot a bird from a flock of birds with a shotgun, you’re likely to kill more than one. The same applies to former cancer treatment, in which case not only the malignant tumour was removed but also lots of other, healthy cells. Nowadays they try to avoid that with new technology and equipment. When he was finished, I had the opportunity to tell my story and the crowd listened breathlessly. I showed them a poster of Britonfolder, told them they could support me by putting some spare money in the designated collection boxes and thanked them for coming. It was reassuring to see that some picked up a poster which I had put on a table near the exit of the lecture theatre.
