According to recent studies conducted by the National Cancer Institute, almost 600,000 people per year die of cancer. Approximately 170,000 of them die from lung cancer alone.

This is not anti-smoking propaganda — it is real life.

The ideal world everyone would like to inhabit is one safe from pain, one where everyone might be happy. There would still be the uncertainty of life and death, but at least in this utopia people would never have to die of cancer.

Here some of those 600,000 cancer victims might live a little longer.

The world of IVs, white pills and oxygen machines is one everyone fears, and one no one wants to deal with — especially me.

Suffering is a story I have heard about, not one I have experienced. Never have I had to climb the peaks and troughs on an LCD machine. The only ICU I have ever seen is on television. Nobody actually went there in real life. That is, until recently.

But as of late I have been ushered into the world of grief from which many have already come and gone. Unfortunately, I will not be the last to visit.

When I first heard someone I knew had lung cancer, I still felt unaffected. I did not and could not believe it. I guess nobody does, or at least wants to. I once immaturely thought cancer doesn’t affect individual people; rather it is just a plague of the masses. But that has all changed now.

It doesn’t happen to those 600,000 strangers. It happens to the people we know and love. From this point, the comfortable and safe reality in which one formerly dwelled is shattered into thousands of pieces, and the hardest thing in the world to pick them up and put them back together again.

Perhaps because the picture is never as pretty as it used to be.

But that is exactly what one must do. It is the duty of the well to take care of and encourage the sick.

Tragedy is the worst nightmare anyone can ever have, and no one is exempt from having it. It hits harder than a punch to the gut, only to sting even more after the initial shock.

People get sick, and yes, people die. The Grim Reaper knows us all by name. But my problem is why he treats some more kindly than others. That I do not, and will not, ever understand.

One out of every two men will have some type of cancer, as will one out every three women, or so the American Cancer Society tells me. Until now I have always known the other man and the other two women who never got cancer; things changed and the once-safe world where I lived has been crushed beyond all belief.

It all started with that dreaded phone call. If you have received it you know what I am talking about. The one where you can barely understand what the person on the other end of the line is saying because he or she is crying so hard.

All one knows is something is terribly wrong. I recently answered that call.

The person I feel safest around was now scarce of breath and the tears she shed felt as if they were dripping from the ear-hole on my cell phone. This time pain had struck her family, and consequentially, pain had also struck mine.

Life seems at times to have no mercy. Pain does not care who it meets; it is of its own domain and when it rains, it pours.

Pain is something people can try to run from but they will find there is nowhere to hide. Suffering has no prejudices, biases or any personal taste. As humans, it is one of the many characteristics of life that binds us together.

As I wade deeper into the waters of the world, I am beginning to realize nothing is to be taken for granted, health especially. Experience tells me optimism is fear’s worst enemy and hope remains our greatest ally, but above them both is where love conquers all.

So to all those dealing with strife, may hope bid you well and love carry you through.

E-mail Warren at [email protected].