CANCER respects neither age nor position. One has only to visit a cancer hospital to realise how indiscriminate the choice of its victims is. Or read recent revelations by royalty.
The public announcement by Catherine, Princess of Wales, that she has been diagnosed with an unspecified cancer is at one level heartrending. She is 42 years old, a loving wife and a devoted mother of three. At another level, by appeasing the ravenous press, she is paying the price for marrying into the fishbowl of royalty.
With an almost Shakespearean irony, her 75-year-old father-in-law King Charles III has also been diagnosed with cancer. The House of Windsor is two steps closer to becoming a hospice.
In 2011, the same year that Prince William and Kate Middleton married, the billionaire Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer. Famously, he said that “being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me”, adding the truism, “the most precious resource we all have is time”. Unconsciously, Jobs echoed the sentiments of the dying Queen Elizabeth I: “All my possessions for a moment of time.”
Over 75pc of patients are treated free in the SKMCH system.
Over the centuries between the first and second Elizabethan ages, the........