Uncategorized 02 Oct 2005 03:39 pm
Fuck you, cancer.
I’ve just been swapping email with an old acquaintance with whom I’d lost touch. He’s got cancer. It sounds like it’s being treated well and he’s in good spirits. Still, I have to ask — what the hell? What the hell is with the cancer, people? Among my acquaintances, this is the seventh case in the last few years.
Someone I knew a little and liked a lot died several months ago of cancer. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, of all the crappy things to die of — no health insurance and no money meant that she didn’t get diagnosis and treatment until it had reached stage IV. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is tremendously treatable if it’s caught early, even semi-early. Lots of people recover fully. If she had lived in a country with universal health care, Sybil might well be alive and happy today and finishing her first book.
I haven’t discussed it in my journal before because it seemed like every goddamn few months this year somebody got a cancer diagnosis, and I did not want to break out the scary. But I think of her. A few days ago there was a perfect crisp fall day, one of those days when the wind comes up and the light is sparkling, the kind of day you might wait for all through a hot August. Sybil would have loved it.
on 02 Oct 2005 at 4:29 pm 1.Joy said …
gigo, I think. Humans have put a lot of garbage into the surroundings over the course of our existence – cancer is our version of London’s pea-soup industrial fog.
You were probably being rhetorical, now that I think about it. But I’ve been aware of the same kind of increase in numbers of diagnoses among people I know, too.
on 02 Oct 2005 at 5:23 pm 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Only semi-rhetorical.
The amount of unnecessary carcinogenic crap in our environments is amazing.