Steve Jobs has cancer op

The NYT is reporting that Jobs had a successful operation to remove a tumour. According to the Times, “Mr. Jobs, 49, said he had a form of pancreatic cancer that can be cured by surgical removal of the tumor. He said he would not have chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

‘I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year,” he wrote in the message, which Apple made public on Sunday evening, “and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was).'”

I’m glad Jobs is going to be ok. He’s a bit of a monster (I know people who have worked for him), but at least he creates great products, and saved Apple from the scrapheap of computing history. I am inescapably reminded, though, of a terrible story about Evelyn Waugh (another monster). Waugh was sitting in his London Club one afternoon when someone came in and told him that their mutual friend, Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son], had undergone a successful operation to remove a non-malignant tumour. “Ah”, said Waugh, “the wonders of medical science: to have found the only bit of Randolph that wasn’t malignant — and then to remove it!