Cancer Diary: When the Body Won’t Stand Down
There are seasons when the body behaves like a person who has seen too much. It stays awake long after the danger has passed. It keeps watch. It keeps guard. It refuses to stand down. Chronic inflammation is the biological version of that—an internal vigilance that becomes its own kind of harm. People imagine cancer as a sudden arrival, a lightning strike. But most cancers are slow architecture. They rise out of landscapes that have been irritated, injured, or inflamed for years. Chronic inflammation is not the only path to cancer, but it is one of the most common, most studied, and most preventable. It is the quiet soil in which malignancy grows. This is the story of that soil. The Body’s Alarm That Never Turns Off Acute inflammation is the body’s emergency response—heat around a cut, swelling around a sprained ankle, fever during infection. It is meant to be brief. It is meant to solve a problem and then go home. Chronic inflammation is what happens when the emergency crew neve...