Steve I have a new nightly routine. We still hang, but it ends differently.
This I could never have predicted.
Steve stays upstairs to “read” a book.
This is SHOCKING. Steve is a reader but a reader of articles, the headlines, not texts. But now he reads incessantly.
On my end, I had a date to get to. In all that living in the now on the boat, I got behind, on Bachelor in Paradise. Work to do!
I can enjoy this pleasure because I’m feeling pretty confident in my role. I’m up to date on my end. You know my role in curing Neuroblastoma and future cancers.
My role is clear.
Steve’s role is clear.
Steve is the warrior. He is in charge of building an arsenal. He is in charge of the attack from the level of medicine to even genetics. In our gannt chart of cancer, he leads.
As Howard Skipper, one of the leaders in leukemia studies in the 1970’s, said: “but we cannot afford to sit and wait for the promise of tomorrow so long as stepwise progress can be made with the tools at hand today.” (1971). Sadly this quote from the 70’s still holds true.
There is no waiting for the WHY to be solved. Don’t think he/we are not working on it, but we recognize that the science/understanding is not there yet. We recognize that we may be farther in our fight of cancer (our pursuit of attack) than understanding why it even occurs. BUT kids lives are on the line. War it is!
The warrior I am not. This is not my talent. My job is clear. I will focus on prevention as I often think the answers to complicated questions are usually right in front of our faces. More on that in our joint letter.
But my biggest role is to FUND Steve’s work. That is my job and its a big one. And I mean fund in every sense of the word.
The obvious one is money and awareness. Mind the Gap’s biggest stakeholder is cancer. Check. Working on that.
However, that isn’t my biggest “funding” lift.
Funding the talent is the real necessity. Money, I’ve learned is only part of the answer. You need to have people to fund, you need to have thinkers.
We need people. We need minds.
This will be Mind the Gap’s biggest donation, the minds of the future.
We need a generation that can let go of egos and work as one. We need a generation that believes in sharing information and goods. We need a generation that is resourceful. We need a generation of US over ME. A generation that values humanity. A generation that asks questions like WHY instead of going straight to HOW. A generation that has the p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e to even ask.
And most importantly, we need a generation of people who COMMUNICATE. The issues in communication between doctors, researchers, patients, etc. through the last decades is hard to read and there are SO many examples. So many stories of people obsessed with their theory, rejecting research to even test them. The outcome, years and lives wasted.
So we each have our role.
I will fund the fight.
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