This is the first in a series of postings related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way.
I am starting with blood: what it is made of, and how that affects our very being.
Blood and its qualities have long served as powerful metaphors for the human condition. And people spend a lot of time putting things into the bloodstream to alter their mental state. In the case of medical treatments, the alterations are less voluntary.
In the case of chemotherapy, you are also taking something away from the blood's basic composition, rather than adding to it. Chemo works by killing off cells that divide and grow rapidly. This targets cancer but also catches other, more useful, cells
