Unpredictability in life can be beneficial.

I had an appointment to meet someone this morning. It was an old friend whom I had seen only the day before and he was healthy although paralysed from the chest down to his feet. However, an hour before the time of appointment his wife telephoned me to inform that he was warded in a hospital in another state as a result of a bloated stamach and fever the night before.

So, I was unable to see him today. My plans for the day had to be changed. Instead, I used the time allocated to him, to go to the bank as well as the library to study information on cancer. I read of a doctor who found some patients able to fight their own cancer cells. He believed it was due to the immune system. From here on, this doctor, Dr. Steven Rosenberg set out to find out if immunotherapy and ,later, gene therapy could succeed as he had seen many cases where surgery, chemotheraphy and radiation had failed to help cancer patients recover from cancer. His first successes came in 1984 when he found that the tumour of a patient had shrunk. Was this a new solution to cancer treatment? Although it was hoped that the answer could be positive, that doctor found that it was still too early and so was cautious in his optimism. Interesting! It has given me a new direction to explore for cancer cures.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the combination of chemotherapy, T cells and high-dose IL-2 was shown to be effective even in patients who had previously failed high-dose IL-2 treatment. IL-2 is the name of the genes created by Dr. Steven Rosenberg.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'it was not the first time that gene therapy was used in cancer. Tumor cells modified with a gene for immune growth factors such as GM-CSF, had been used many years previously and continue to be used as an effective form of gene therapy and immunotherapy for cancer.'

If life had not been unpredictable and the extra time afforded me to dig for knowledge in another place, I would not have read about the above doctor. So, unpredictability of each day in life can be interesting and adventurous. We can be given a different path to travel and discover new things. And each time I read something new, I realise that there is so much more to know, so much more to live for and so important to live life to the full.