I’m writing this on Sunday morning, but will schedule it to go out as usual this evening, round about the first time in over 20 years that Arsenal will be crowned premier league champions. Now you may or may not follow football, and you may or may not like Arsenal, but please indulge me with a quick reflection on events of the last week as I think they merit comment from a very human perspective.
By way of background for non-football fans, on Tuesday night Bournemouth secured the point needed against Manchester City to give Arsenal an unassailable lead at the top, meaning today’s game away at Crystal Palace is a dead rubber. What followed on Tuesday night was extraordinary. Although there was no game in north London, 100,000 people descended on the Emirates stadium to celebrate. In these troubled, divisive days we live in, a mass crowd like that would surely be policed, multiple arrests made, rival tribes facing off against one another. Yet here, the message was of love and unity. Watch the footage online. People of all different colour, religion, gender and any other attribute you care to mention, spontaneously coming together as one. It was really very moving and humbling. Many of the stories that came out of it were equally so, and some of the players even turned up at 5am the next day having not been to bed, to find fans still there and they continued celebrating together. As I said at the top, you may not even like football, least of all Arsenal, but I hope you can be moved by the story of human connection. It sure beats all the other news stories these days. I’m going up next weekend to watch the Champions League final game at the stadium, and go to the parade the next day. Win or lose that game it will be an amazing experience I’m sure.
Sadly I’m now going to pivot to the other extreme of emotions. You may remember my blog a few weeks back from my medical school 25th reunion. It was such a fabulous event, and wonderful to catch up with people I’ve not seen in many years. The WhatsApp group pinged this morning with the terrible news that one of the attendees died today. She had metastatic cancer, and finally succumbed. Although I didn’t know her super well, we had some friendship groups which overlapped and I remember her well, as a particularly studious and hard-working student destined for great things. To be taken at such a young age is awful. Of my year she is the second to die, which is a horrible reminder that our relatively young age is no guarantee of good health. Bad luck can catch up with any of us, especially cancer, but we can stack the odds in our favour for a great many other illnesses.
I’m feeling quite reflective and sad after today’s news, and wondering a bit how to process it. Perhaps simply telling her story and educating is a good start. Preventive medicine is so poorly done the world over. Modern medicine is excellent at treating you once you’ve got a condition, but terrible at reducing the risk of getting that condition in the first place. As a society we have to change our way of thinking on this. The rates of diabetes, inactivity, obesity, metabolic syndrome and all of the consequences of that are on the rise. I cannot see any legislative action that will tackle this any time soon, so it is on all of us to manage our health from a preventive standpoint as best we can. Over the next few weeks I’m planning to write a little series on the major health conditions and the practical steps we can take to help ourselves. There will invariably be some overlap, and like most things in medicine, there will be the ‘main take-aways’ and the smaller points for those that wish to know about them. In any case, on this Sunday morning it seems like a good plan to make.