My mom recently had a large part of her intestines and reproductive organs removed. A long summer of chemo has left her pretty frail.
My dad passed from lymphoma when I was ten. Couple years later I developed some nearly debilitating neurosis connected to food additives, cigarette smoke, chemicals in everyday products. I hated reading anything or going anywhere since there just seemed to be this explosion of reminders all of a sudden about cancer. We had to read "death be not proud" in school and it just made me want to quit. A therapist told me that my obsessing was not rational. People have always died of cancer. He said he was about my age when his dad got a blue ford van. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone in town was copying his dad. Blue ford vans all over the place. A misperception, of course. I understood his point, but still couldn't shake the threat. It followed me into jobs and relationships and left some mess.
Now there's a little of the same thing. Since this last year with mom, my antennae is tuned to cancer once again and it seems that it's EVERYWHERE. Calm down brad, nothing's changed.
Recently I read an article, in the New Yorker I think it was, highlighting the work of a few professionals arguing that environmental factors, man made factors, are indeed a greater cause than is generally accepted. Countering the "it's always been with us, but under different names and, besides, we're all living longer" assurance they're applying modern forensics to bones and tissue samples from the past and discovering that the prevlance of childhood cancers was extremely rare, compared to today's figures, prior to the last two centuries.
What to say? I have some beef with Rachael Carson and extreme back-to-nature fear mongering. I like my modern life. I also have some beef with totally 'free market' industrialists and a wholesale, often public, denial of any harm for the sake of profit.
But I don't want to die of cancer before my time. And I've already seen some enormous costs.
