In the game of World of Warcraft, Patrice Anseline is a level 85 Blood Elf Death Knight called Sackmagraph, of the Dath’Remar Horde’s Hydra guild.
In reality, he is a Victorian father-of-three who is facing the painful truth that he may soon die from prostate cancer, which has reached the lining of the brain and is inoperable.
Mr Anseline, 51, lives a dual life: doctors’ exams and precious family time during the day, fighting dragons and trolls for hours at night — often falling asleep with the mouse in his hand.
He recently revealed to his friends in the World of Warcraft community that doctors have told him he does not have much longer to live.
“I told them … I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “A few people stopped playing and they just said to me, ‘What, are you serious’.
“They used the word Eminance, that’s my other nickname on World of Warcraft, and they said, ‘Eminance, we are going to pray for you at church’.”
Mr Anseline, who lives with his family in Moe, said he and other players with cancer were using the game as a support group.
“At the end of the day World of Warcraft is a game. But the difference between it and other games is it is a game that includes social interaction,” he said.
He created a thread in a World of Warcraft forum about his illness and several others affected by cancer came forward.
Cyndilou, a level 71 Undead Rogue, posted on the thread: “I am battling breast cancer. Going on my third year of treatments, but I am doing great now … My husband bought us WoW to give me something to take my mind off my pains, and it worked much better than we ever expected.”
Another player, a level 85 Blood Elf named Caibhe, wrote: “In 2003 I was diagnosed with kidney cancer … I’ve been in remission for around eight years now and to me having cancer isn’t like any other disease. I have made friends and shared laughs.
“To me it’s a brotherhood that you enter on a journey at first alone and scared but come out with friends and a better life.” …
via Dying man finds support on World of Warcraft.
Thanks to greed that makes money more important than a safe healthy environment, many more of us will need to take our minds off of dying from cancer, so this is good to know. I’ll more likely spend my last days researching cures as John Kanzius did.
Kanzius RF Therapy is an experimental cancer treatment that employs a combination of either gold or carbon nanoparticles and radio waves to heat and destroy cancer cells without damaging healthy cells.[3][7][8]
The specific absorption rate for radio waves by living tissue in the proposed wavelengths and intensity levels is very low. Metals absorb this energy much more efficiently than tissue through dielectric heating; Richard Smalley has suggested that carbon nanotubes could be used to similar purpose.[9] If nanoparticles were to be preferentially bound to cancer sites, cancer cells could be destroyed or induced into apoptosis while leaving healthy tissue relatively unharmed.[10] This preferential targeting represents a major technical challenge. According to a presentation by Dr. Steven Curley, the types of cancer potentially treatable using Kanzius RF therapy include essentially all forms of cancer.[11]
Kanzius built a prototype Kanzius RF device in his home, and formed Therm Med., LLC to test and market his inventions.[12][13] The device was successfully tested at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 2005.[4] As of 2007-04-23, preliminary research using the device at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center[3][14][15] and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center[12] has shown early promise. If federal approval is granted, testing on human patients may follow.[6][10][16] An article published in late 2010 illustrates that radiofrequency fields induce intracellular hyperthermia and necrosis in pancreatic tumors without injury to the human pancreatic tissue grafts tested.[17]
