Cancers In Our Lives

I am a retired person. I’ve reached the age of 69 years. I’ve been retired for 17 years. This also is an age where I’ve begun to notice that my friends and acquaintances are dropping off this mortal coil at an ever increasing rate. One of the principal causes is cancer.
I just learned yesterday that a friend went to the hospital for a rather simple surgery: hernia repair. Once the incision was made, another problem became immediately apparent. Further exploration revealed a tumor. In this case, it was a large ovarian type of cancer. It had already spread to many parts of her body, without any major obvious symptoms. She had been having problems with unexpected, sudden weight gain. Now her prognosis is, at best, grim. Surgery will come first to remove most of the major body of the tumor, followed by heavy chemotherapy.
My brother in law is in the final stages of prostate cancer. He has had many types of treatments, but distant future plans are not being made.
Personally, I’ve had to deal with several instances of skin cancer, including surgical repair of my nose to deal with the loss of excised tissue. Please, no jokes about skin off my nose! Until you’ve experienced having a doctor slice off a slab of your nose, you don’t know the level of anxiety and down-right fear that dwells inside your skull. Recently my doctor suggested that it was time to do the blood test again for the possibility of onset of prostate cancer. “You’re at that age, you know.” My results were very good: 1.3. Anything under 4 is a good score.
Both of my parents had to deal with cancers. My father had a non malignant form which was barely operable. The removal of his tumor was very involved delicate surgery. The surgery was lengthy, and left him decisively less mobile, agile, and looking like Dr. Frankenstein had stitched him together. My mother had thyroid cancer, and a complete hysterectomy due to cancer of the reproductive system. She apparently made a full recovery from these surgeries and follow-up treatments. Later in life, she developed breast cancer, had a mastectomy, and was thought to have recovered from this surgery. Subsequently, however, she developed liver cancer. While she responded well to treatment, this time the disease eventually was terminal.
For a good portion of my lifetime, we have been in “a war” with cancers. By every standard I can see, and measure against incidents in my life, as listed above, and the people I have known and admired, we are still on the losing side of the war. This not to say that progress in understanding the disease has not been made. Treatments for cancers have improved. Medical understanding of the mechanisms of the disease has improved, but silver bullet cures are not on the horizon.
Are there more cancers today, or are there simply more people? I suspect that a combination of things is at work: there are more people, more people are living longer, and more people are casually exposed during this longer lifespan to a variety of cancer precursors through daily living and employment. Today, medicine is doing better in the fight with cancers with better diagnosis, multiple levels of treatment, and earlier detection. Despite all this, then the Law of the Bell Curve raises its ugly head. The Bell Curve simply acknowledges the existence of the extremes of any situation. One side of the curve is a higher level in the general sensitivity to cancer precursors for a significant portion of the population. There are probably more precursors in our environment than ever before due to useful human technologies, and to which we may be exposed.
Due only to simple ignorance, exposures may be more frequent, more intense, and therefore more dangerous. An example: in my youth, my Mom kept a bottle of carbon tetraflouride in the house as a cleaning agent. The compound worked very well with stubborn stains. No one knew to wear rubber gloves, or a positive air pressure face mask to limit skin exposure and breathing of this chemical. I will always think that a possibility exists that my Mom’s exposure to carbon-tet and other chemicals had something to do with her cancers later in life. Of course, it could have been other factors. Now we all must be concerned with multiple chemical exposures in and from our environment: legal and illicit pharmaceuticals, industrial materials, agricultural chemicals, petroleum byproducts, and even food additives. Even if “we’ve been using this stuff forever” does not mean that it is safe to continue to do so, nor expose our children and grandchildren to them. Examples are: cocaine and tobacco products. Once, each was considered safe, effective, and even to have curative benefits.
Another, if you are counting, is asbestos. Asbestos has many high quality benefits. It was once commonly used in heat containment, for pipes and even clothing. It was used in auto body repair materials. It was used in automobile brake shoes. Today we know that asbestos has a down side: death due to mesothelioma, a.k.a. lung cancer.
Research seems to indicate that children are much more at risk from exposures to any chemical than are adults. The facts are that we do not really know if many commonly used products are safe for children and adults. Remember lead in house paint? Looking ahead to a time when infants might consume flakes of scaling paint simply was not something that was thought about. Now we know high levels of lead can cause mental retardation. Do you remember the problems with thalidomide? How do we assess the risks of air and ground water contamination or of pollution? How are you or your children affected by eating foods that result from animals fed medicated feeds? How about animals injected with growth hormones to increase their weight? Maybe we are just all playing “the Big Lotto” and we haven’t even purchased a ticket. Maybe we don’t really know the final cost of allowing food producers and processors to “play around” with our food supply.
Please do not think that I’m trying to “paste one on” the food industry. They are an important and necessary part of supplying our population with wholesome food. I for one have had the experience of raising 100 chickens destined for the freezer. When you’ve killed, plucked, butchered, and packaged 100 chickens, you also learn the “value” of the service of the food processing business.
I just picked up a popular and widely read magazine (Reader’s Digest 05/2010) wherein I found a whole section devoted to current health issues. One subject was colorectal cancer. This is the second most deadly terminal cancer. What is suggested by the American Cancer Society to combat the occurrence of colorectal cancer? Suggestions include eating fish, milk, soy products, garlic, and reducing your consumption of red and processed meats. In the same section of the magazine was another article about a chemical that frequently finds its way into our food supply through a variety of ways: bisphenol A, known as BPA. BPA is found in containers for food. Cans, beverage bottles, drinking cups, and plastic food trays have BPA. The chemical is so ubiquitous in the food industry that it is almost impossible to easily avoid it.
While I’ve made a point of writing about man-made contamination of our environment, Mother Nature plays her part as well. I have had the experience of living in a variety of environments. In one place, ground water had such a high level of naturally occurring fluorine that persons that drank the water on a long term basis developed brown stained teeth. They rarely had cavities, but many found the coloration of their teeth objectionable. In another location, the ground water was naturally high in the concentration of arsenic. It was a part of the underlying geology. There was no easy solution.
How should I conclude this article? This is not a medical research paper. Mostly I’m trying to emotionally cope with a high level of awakening concern about friends and other folks around me. Partly I’m concerned about me, but I recognize that frankly I do not have all many years left in which to worry about it. My higher level of concern is for my grandchildren. What will the world be like that my generation leaves to them? Perhaps my taking the time today to write about my concerns will encourage you to examine how you interact in your personal space and environment. Maybe positive changes can be made for the future if enough people become concerned. Make your vote count. You can do that.
Keywords: cancer, environment, contamination, pollution, medicated feeds, hormones, asbestos, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, industrial materials, agricultural chemicals, petroleum byproducts, food additives, thalidomide, carbon tetraflouride, colorectal, mesothelioma, lung cancer, breast cancer, skin cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, thyroid cancer, liver cancer

(c) Copyright 2008: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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