The cancer eon
This is one of my absolute favourite photos from my cancer eon.
Photo from 2022-09-26: Things are already going better after one cycle
From the comments
James Petrosky:"But James, shouldn't that be era?" Look, it's not anyone's fault that we don't teach the subdivisions of geological time in school (also, I don't think we should, time would be much better spent on astronomy or evolution).
An eon is the largest division of time, the precambrian is takes up three of four eons. In analogy, moving out after high school might be the sort of thing worthy of changing an eon. For me, cancer is an eon.
An era is a subdivision of an eon. The mezosoic is an era. All dinosaurs evolved, lived and died (except birds) in the mezosoic. I have chemotherapy, surgery and post surgery eras.
To torture the metaphor, eras are made of periods. Jurassic, ordovician, paleogene. I did three courses of chemotherapy (broken up by CT scans), each course is a period.
Periods are broken into epochs. If you hear a geologist say "upper triassic", that's an epoch. A 14 day cycle of chemotherapy would be an epoch.
Finally, we have ages. The smallest geological unit. The metaphor is stretched to uselessness, but the comparison is a day.