It is a morning radio show. Two celebrities chatting, taking a few phone calls, helping folks wake up. Across North America there are hundreds of shows just like it. Normally, I listen with a passive ear, but this morning the hosts got into cancer and that got my attention. One host said that a "doctor" told him that most people die of cancer or heart disease. The best option for most of us, he advised, is to eat more bacon. Then the two hosts went into a deeper, yet emotional, conversation about how cancer is the worst scourge to ever visit the earth, how terrible it is, how it would be better to just have a heart attack and be gone (as if all heart warriors just pass on). Or at least that was the gist of it.
And this is 2007....250 years after the age of Enlightenment. Amazing. It is just that kind of hip-shooting from lay people that horrify so many people about "cancer." That's exactly the kind of attitude that keeps so many men from check-ups: They would rather have it and not know about it. It is also what sends panicked caregivers and Warriors to the Internet looking for the cure. It is exactly the media attitude that breeds so many maudlin national and television "specials" and news reports on the subject. And why so many people are ready to give up the fight the day they are diagnosed. That in itself is a tragedy of public ignorance.
Of course some cancers are aggressive and can kill in a manner of weeks or months, depending on when they are diagnosed. Most others, however, are much less aggressive and can take years to reach a stage of any kind of debilitation, much less whack you. And these well meaning media folks talk about cancer as if it were one disease, rather than a family of diseases that has more than 300 members, and an equal number of manifestations.
A friend of mine died suddenly last Friday of a massive heart attack. Just didn't get out of bed. Later that day he had planned a golf lesson for a couple of his buddies. I wonder, would he be happier to be gone unexpectedly from a heart attack or have inactive Stage 4 kidney cancer and lived another six or seven years? Hell, six or seven months? I am having a hard time thinking the former, regardless of the toll the medicines take on cancer Warriors.
Cancer is terrible...and it is in far too many cases a fatal disease. Good chance it is, one day, going to kill me. But it is also in many cases very manageable giving cancer Warriors time many heart Warriors can only wish for. Sure, for many of us the time is going to come when our bodies just can't fight it anymore, but that time could be a long time coming. But that's just part of life with cancer...and heart disease.
I think the radio celebrities, considering their wide market here, upset a lot of people this morning. Unwittingly, yes. Unnecessarily, too.
I am also afraid it is part of an unintended national misinformation epidemic.
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