Category: cancer

a feminist

I was sitting in the waiting room at the oncologist’s, when a young kid, a teenager, came in with what I assumed to be his girlfriend. The kid talked about x-rays of his lungs with the admins, so it seemed he was the patient. They went to sit across the room from me and I couldn’t hear their every word, but it was clear the young woman had had a discussion about feminism in class today.

“Feminists don’t hate men,” she said. “Man-haters are called misandrists.”

She said they had looked up the definition of a feminist, and learned that a feminist is a person who supports equal rights, and equality in pay and opportunities. Her boyfriend said that he thought those things were no-brainers. “Then you’re a feminist!”, she said.

This is where I couldn’t quite hear his response. But clearly he didn’t like the word feminist, or the idea that he was one.

Too bad, kid. You were doing so good. I have a feeling that 18 year old girlfriend won’t be giving up anytime soon, tho.

how much do you know about your colon?

I had a colonoscopy in December*. It’s a standard cancer screening procedure in the United States once you’ve turned 50. They didn’t find any cancer, but both the doctor and the paperwork I was given (the paperwork included fresh pictures of my insides; one showing my intact appendix) stated that I have a “grossly redundant colon”.

In plain language that means that my colon is several times the length of a normal person’s. It’s a nuisance for a doc trying to navigate a tiny camera, but it’s not dangerous, and has no symptoms.

A grossly redundant colon is a hereditary condition, though.

So at one point I asked my parents about it, to learn which one of them had given me my extra-long intestines. My parents are both in their 80s, and have lived their whole lives in Sweden, a country with national health care and some of the best research hospitals in the world.

Neither of my parents knew anything about the length of their colons, because neither of them had ever had a colonoscopy.

According to an article in the New York Times today Americans pay more for medical procedures than people in any other well developed country. In the case of colonoscopies, American medical centers bill insurance companies $7-8000 for a screening procedure that would cost $650 in another country, if it’s even performed. Only in the US are colonoscopies the go-to screening test for colon cancer, because there aren’t, actually, any data to support that colonoscopies are better than less expensive screening methods. Another example: A nasal spray that costs $108 in the United States will run you $21 in Spain.

“The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as most other developed countries.”, the NYT article states. Winners? Health care providers, manufacturers, drug companies, all working together to drive up costs. Losers? Whoever pays the insurance premiums.

* Also known as the day when Dan wasn’t white enough to drive me home.

oh-high-oh

Five years ago today I was a couple of weeks into 20 weeks of chemo therapy treatments. I had just lost my hair and the drugs were kicking my butt. I wasn’t scared. And that’s what boggles my mind when I think back.

I’m having my annual mammogram this week, and it’s freaking me out. I’ve had a few of those after treatment, and every time I’ve been shaking, or crying, or both. Last year I felt dizzy and had to go sit down before we could finish. (If you’re a woman you know it’s not just one x-ray either.)

Maybe it’s a delayed response, or maybe it’s just the overall knowledge that I could have died. No, that I would have died hadn’t it been for modern medicine.

Right now I’m making plans to go to a wedding over the 4th of July weekend, in Ohio. A friend of mine is getting married to his boyfriend — or, rather, they have chosen July 5 to celebrate the fact that they got married a little while earlier, in a state that recognizes gay marriage.

The two parts of this story are unrelated, more or less. I’m glad to be alive, and I’m glad Noel and Kyle can get married. Times change.

you have to get yourself out of yourself

I watched Swedish literary talk show ‘Babel‘ the other day. Host Jessika Gedin was interviewing Kristian Gidlund, who has written a book, and a blog, about fighting stomach cancer. Gedin prefaced the interview by saying that several people had suggested she’d read Gidlund’s book, but that she’d been hesitant to do so until Gidlund was going to be a guest on the show (and she had no choice).

We have to assume that it was fear that kept Gedin from reading a book written by a 29-year-old cancer patient.

I told my Intro to Media Studies class this story as an example of what happens when we avoid topics that we perceive to be ‘sensitive’: We exclude experiences, and people, who have the right to be heard, and from whom we probably have something to learn.

One of my students agreed vehemently. “Books like that are supposed to be inspirational”, he said. “It’s wrong to avoid them”.

When I told him that Gidlund is dying, and that he said in the interview that he doesn’t expect to make it much past summer, my student’s face changed. He hadn’t thought about that, that cancer actually can kill you. He didn’t think of that because so much of the cancer rhetoric is concentrated on the fight, the heroes, the survivors, the inspirational stories.

Gedin introduced Gidlund by talking about the shift in his life when he went from being a touring musician to a cancer patient. “Plans for the future were replaced by cancer treatments”, she said.

When you are diagnosed with cancer treatments are your plans for the future. And, given the circumstances, they seem to be pretty good plans too. At least to you. It was irritating to me to watch an interview where the interviewer proved herself to be incapable of appreciating that her perspective is a perspective, not the truth. Instead she kept using her perspective, the outsider’s perspective, to ‘explain’ the experience of her cancer patient guest.

I suspect she hadn’t read the book after all.