Carmen Uscatu, Founding Member and President of Give Life, shared a post on LinkedIn:
” ‘The Greeks used an evocative word to describe tumors, onkos, meaning ‘mass’ or ‘burden.’ The word was more prescient than they might have imagined. Cancer is indeed the load built into our genome, the leaden counterweight to our aspirations for immortality.
But if one looks back even further behind the Greek to the ancestral Indo-European language, the etymology of the word onkos changes. Onkos arises from the ancient word nek.
And nek, unlike the static onkos, is the active form of the word load. It means to carry, to move the burden from one place to the next, to bear something across a long distance and bring it to a new place. It is an image that captures not just the cancer cell’s capacity to travel—metastasis-but also Atossa’s journey, the long arc of scientific discovery-and embedded in that journet, the animus, so inextricably human, to outwit, to outlive and survive.’*
This is exactly what we, Dăruiește Viață, did together with the team from Prinses Máxima Centrum voor kinderoncologie during their visit to Marie Curie Children’s Hospital.
Three teams from the pathology laboratory Ronald de Krijger, Rubina Moeniralam, Jeanine Kruijsbeek, surgery, Kees van de Ven, and oncology Martine van Grotel, Linda de Koning-Smits, Suzan Trienekens—alongside our dedicated teams at Marie Curie: Augustina Enculescu and her pathology team, Anna Maria Kadar and surgery team, Ruxandra Vidlescu and oncology team—carried ideas, just as the ancient word nek suggests, as an active, shared effort to move hope forward.
We established future projects, refined existing ones, discussed minimally invasive surgical techniques, and explored innovations in oncology and laboratory medicine — all to help our patients carry their journey with better outcomes.
Because in the end, like nek implies: we don’t just bear the burden… we carry it forward together.
*from the book The Emperor of All Maladies – A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Photo: Banu Stefan.“
More posts featuring Carmen Uscatu on OncoDaily.
