A Free-Standing Facility
I was listening to a television advertisement for a private cancer clinic. I find it mildly distressing that there is a need for specialized cancer centers, but the need must exist if someone has spent the money to make cancer treatment a for-profit enterprise. I’m not sure what it says that these centers need to advertise. Do people with cancer want to be pitched? Isn’t cancer the infamous C-word which is not spoken? I decided to listen carefully to the ad. There were lots of good advertising differentiators like the friendly and caring nature of the place. There was an emphasis on the flexibility and optionality of the treatments. The selling point was that the center would help you avoid a radical surgical outcome if you wished. That’s a big claim. There was evidence that the facilities were state-of-the-art in their modern technology, implying that other facilities like regular hospitals could not make such claims. And then, the announcer went a step further narrating a view that the center specialized especially in the types of cancer that were somehow of most concern to patients. In the big category of male prostate cancer (the breast cancer for men), this center was the largest free-standing prostate facility in the region. Wow. That’s big.
I remember in college, my fraternity brothers and I making fun of a comic book back-page ad for truck-driving school. The claim was that you could make “twice the money” if you could just learn to drive a truck from them. That’s pretty smart legal maneuvering by this truck-driving college. No one can question the validity of your claim if you just say twice the money. Even I can prove that one and I never went to either law school or truck-driving school. It does make you wonder who exactly finds that sort of claim compelling. Perhaps it’s all those people who don’t read ads too closely. But do you really want to target non-reading consumers when you are doing print advertising?
Is the cancer facility hoping that listeners gloss over and don’t really hear the delimiting “free-standing” aspect of its scale in the prostate cancer arena? What the hell is a free-standing facility anyway? Is that a type of building or does it somehow describe a nature of its lack of affiliation with some hospital or research facility? I would have thought more affiliations are better than less or no affiliations when dealing with something like cancer.
My family and I have been very fortunate. There hasn’t been any cancer in either my or Kim’s family that I know of in this or the next generation. Neither of my parents ever had cancer. The same is true of Kim’s parents. I recognize that this all puts us in a very fortunate minority. I have done the 23-and-Me DNA testing and while these tests are probably just the beginning of what will someday be full-fledged human genome profiling that will keep us all healthy in advance of any incipient cancer or other debilitating issues, for now this test simply suggests that I am less prone than not. That and my family history is enough to reassure me that my worries can focus elsewhere.
We are on a flight to San Francisco to visit our friends Frank and Lydia. I can’t say about Lydia and her family, but I know that Frank has had his struggles with the beast of cancer. His wife Sally, a wonderful woman of extraordinary grace, was taken far too soon (at an age four years younger than my age now). Frank himself has had to wrestle the beast. He was able to beat it back and it seems to be out of the picture now.
On the plane I happened on a strange movie called The Art of Racing in the Rain. I thought it was a car racing movie, but it is a movie about a dog owned by a race car driver. Kevin Coster provided the voice of the dog named Enzo (as in Enzo Ferrari). It’s the kind of movie that Hallmark likes to make and show at Christmas. The man is a talented aspiring race car driver who, on a whim, buys a golden retriever puppy who joins him at all his racing events. Coster tells us that Enzo is all about racing and being loyal to his master. The man’s life progresses into a marriage and a child while Enzo observes the passing of life’s important moments. Then tragedy strikes, as it somehow must in all good stories. The man’s young wife is visited and taken by the beast, leaving the man and his daughter to fight with the maternal grandparents over custody of the daughter. The dog narrates the travails of man and beast and survives a car accident just to help guide his master to where he needs to be in his life’s race. Enzo in wise and the narration tells us that dogs know much more about the natural world in its completeness than man can ever know.
Needless to say, Enzo helps to pilot the man to overcome his problems and still maintain his perspective. The dog has watched one documentary about dogs in Mongolia and thereby retains all the Eastern Zen Wisdom to understand the ways of the world. He knows that his life’s mission is not over until he has learned all that he must learn. This final lesson takes place in a race car on the racetrack that fades to future and the Ferrari test track in Italy, where the man has eventually achieved his racing dreams. It is a tear-jerker to be sure, but it is one with a clear message we can all use to guide us through life.
The dog teaches us that the best drivers don’t dwell on the future or the past. They are in the moment. And those drivers that know how to control their car (the obvious euphemism for life) both on a dry track and a rainy track (the metaphor for what nature throws at us all in some form or another in life), are the drivers that will prevail to win the race. How many movies can teach us that we need to focus on the right priorities in life? Apparently one more with a Ferrari and a dog that sounds like Kevin Costner.
I am still wondering about that free-standing facility in the advertisement, but here’s what I know; go where you gotta go, do what you gotta do and enjoy every minute of the ride, because you never know what beast lurks around the next curve. Make your own free-standing facility to fight off the evils of the world. If you’re lucky there may be a friendly and wise dog to guide you, butI would argue that if we dig deep enough, we all have an inner Enzo to know the way.