Susan Dalgety: My friends keep getting cancer

I have reached that age when there seems to be an explosion of cancer among my friends.

Edinburgh's MoonWalk raises vital funds for cancer research. Picture: Greg Macvean

A former boss of mine, a lovely man, died a few weeks ago, just after his 60th birthday. Another former colleague, a father of five, and not yet 50, is living with an incurable, but manageable, form of the disease.

And at the weekend a friend messaged me to say she had breast cancer, but don’t worry, she wrote, “the prognosis is good”. I should not be surprised. Half of us will develop cancer at some point in our lives. With those odds, it might seem that there is nothing we can do to beat cancer. But there is.

Research is the best weapon we have. Thanks to science, cancer survival has doubled over the last 40 years, and half of all cancer patients now survive for more than ten years.

But scientific research costs money, a seemingly endless pot of it. In an ideal world, governments would spend our taxes on cancer research instead of guns, but we don’t live in Utopia.

So it is up to each of us to help how we can. Take part in events like Edinburgh’s Moon Walk on 9 June, or the Race for Life two weeks later.

Shop in your local Cancer Research charity shop or make a modest monthly donation. Every penny helps save lives. Maybe even yours.