Bunch of stuff to think about...

Heal Magazine has an article about the mounting medical debt piling up in this country. I for one can relate. http://www.healtoday.com/magazine/v2n1/knowledge/debt/index.php

There is also an article about the "late-effect" heart and lung problems associated with Cancer treatments. Lymphoma survivors (myself included) are in the risk category. I was told of the possible damage ABVD can have on my heart and lungs down the road...the problem is not knowing how far down the road. I believe the amount of chemo is relative to the eventual heart and lung damage, but the risks are still there. I was born with a heart murmur, but they told me I checked out okay on my heart scans and (PFT) pulmonary function tests prior to chemo. So we'll see...

http://www.healtoday.com/magazine/v2n1/body/lungwatch/index.php (this is a summary of the story)

I am 10 months into remission. I wake up everyday reminded that I don't feel right, mostly joint and shoulder pain. I blame the chemo for what is probably accelerated osteo-something-or-other. The weather is breaking and I need to finally get outside and be more active and shed some of this weight I gained back post treatment. I also suspect the activity will lessen the bone pain a little bit. But everyday I see the scars and I feel the pain and I hear a new story about someone with Cancer.

Last night my wife gave blood at the local grammar school for a 10 year old boy with a blood cancer who needs constant transfusions. I would have given blood...but I'm not allowed to for the next 4 years or so. This sucks too because I am O-Positive.

I watch the people I work with take countless smoke breaks and I think about my experience with cancer and the drugs and the IVs and the Port-a-catheter and the fatigue and I want to SCREAM at the top of my lungs..."DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING?!?"

If what I went thru from my radical nephrectomy to 6 months of chemo every two weeks was "easy" because it was Hodgkin's ("the good cancer to get if you have to get any"- or so they say) I can only imagine what lung cancer must be like...or something else brought on by smoking...

And then the news yesterday about the medicines/prescription drugs found in drinking water www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,336286,00.html

(A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.
In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.)

(And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies — which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public — have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.
"We recognize it is a growing concern and we're taking it very seriously," said Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.)


They apparently they can't filter them out properly and the side effects these chemicals will have on the human body and the animal food sources we eat and how that will affect the human body...makes me want to SCREAM!!!!!!!! We have too many drugs for too many ailments. Let alone how long these drugs have been in the water and who has gotten sick because of them...

(This contamination would qualify as ENVIRONMENTAL CARCINOGENS)

There is no single place and no single thing that is safe. Everything will kill you.

There is a lyric to a Rick Springfield song that escapes me right now but the line refers to life as a "suicide mission."

I suppose it sounds like a bold statement to make when people respond to the drugs in the drinking water problem or smoking or drinking or whatever... "You gotta die of something" and while that is mostly true we all will die from something, I was in that neighborhood once already (even if all I did was look at the brochures) I toyed with the idea that this cancer was going to kill me...it's a logical step when you're diagnosed and I went there. But it's a stupid thing to say- because when you contemplate your own mortality it leaves you cold and empty. Lets see how tough you really are when death is circling overhead. Jerk!

I had to imagine my kids growing up without me, my wife a widow, my funeral. I may have only done that a few times early on after diagnosis when we didn't know anything yet...but I have been down that street.

Death smells astringent and tastes like metal.


A sick planet means sick people!

How much longer mankind walks on this earth remains to be seen but it's only a matter of time before some drug resistant super bug emerges from a section of rain forest we paved over to put up yet another Wal-mart, Lowes, Home Depot, Starbucks, Bed, Bath and Beyond and Panera Bread strip mall.

We have it coming to us. This planet will shakes us off like a dog with fleas. We are the next dinosaur. It's only a matter of time.



Think about it.

Be well.