Senior Airman Frances Gavalis tosses unserviceable uniform items into a burn pit at Balad Air Base, Iraq.
Tag: cancer
Nov 17 2008
Iraq & Afghanistan: Burn Pits
Mar 17 2008
EENR for Progress: Time to Fight Cancer
If you’re looking for a pie fight or for a joyful diary you won’t find it here. This installment of EENR tonight will be focused on one of the biggest killers in our country; cancer. There was good news released this past February that showed that deaths caused by cancer have decreased by 18.4% among men and 10.5% among women. That does not mean that we don’t need to fight this disease harder than ever. Here’s a snippet from the WAPO:
In 2008, an estimated 1,437,180 new cancers will be diagnosed, and 565,650 people will die of the disease, according to a report released Wednesday from the American Cancer Society (ACS)
Follow me below the fold…..
Feb 21 2008
Lights at Night Linked to Breast Cancer
Reprinted by permission from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
A study of NASA satellite data, overlaid with reported cancer statistics, has identified nighttime exposure to lighted areas as a risk factor for breast cancer:
Women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to an unusual study that overlaid satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries.
“By no means are we saying that light at night is the only or the major risk factor for breast cancer,” said Itai Kloog, of the University of Haifa, who led the new work. “But we found a clear and strong correlation that should be taken into consideration.”
Recommendation below the fold…
Feb 16 2008
Here lay we all
A friend of mine died yesterday, Valentines Day morning. She was at home surrounded by her sisters and held by her husband at the moment her body failed, as they sang to her and prayed. I sat in the hallway a few feet away and listened but did not impose myself to take up precious space at her bedside. She had pancreatic cancer that had remitted and recurred. Pain medication partially worked in the last few days, providing her hours or minutes of unconsciousness at a time but not in the final hour and a half of her life. Although unresponsive, she cried out strongly and often. Drowning finally ended her pain.
A couple of years ago she was diagnosed cancer and her prognosis was less than 5% chance of living beyond 6 months. Her treatment was first rate and with chemotherapy and surgery she went into complete remission. There wasn’t a trace of cancerous tissue in the organs that were removed, the therapy had been so successful, which is rare. However the treatment was so hard on her that she was left a shell of herself. We nearly lost her then and she almost succumbed to the trauma of the treatment. She had intense pride and it was clear she suffered greatly from seeing herself so feeble so she strictly limited her contact with anyone including old friends. Slowly she regained her health with many bumps along the way and only recently did we start seeing her back in her familiar settings. I saw her just before Thanksgiving as she made a point of coming to see me. She looked strong and had the old powerful and happy glint in her eye. She had always been a force to behold and she was back. I hugged her and told her how good she looked. I was happy to finally have her fully here among us again. Not more than a month later her diagnosis was changed again with no hope this time of survival. She went into bottomless depression and refused contact with anyone but her immediate family. Being a nurse, she even attempted push her family away and to find a facility to commit herself to that would oversee her care and allow her to deny her family the witness of the wrenching end she knew was coming. Of course that was far too much to demand of anyone and she was lovingly cared for at home by her family and hospice, but her passing has left wounds on those that were there. Hospice is a blessing, believe me.
Feb 01 2008
A Question Of Care: Military Malpractice?
The family of Marine Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez says military doctors misdiagnosed his skin cancer. Now, as Byron Pitts reports, they wants the U.S. government held accountable for his untimely death.
Jan 11 2008
Too Many People Anyway
The Cancer That Shouldn’t Be
Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable with a new genetic test. Yet doctors still cling to the highly unreliable Pap smear. Something is very wrong here.
Christine Baze and her husband of seven years were planning to start a family in 2000 when she found out she had cervical cancer. At 31 she underwent a hysterectomy followed by three months of drugs and radiation.
Baze was, as she describes it, “the girl who was doing everything right,” getting annual Pap smears that screen for pre-cancerous cervical cells. But the Pap test missed the cancer that had been growing inside her for a decade. Each test had returned a negative result. With early detection, Baze could have treated her cancer with chemotherapy and radiation.”I was devastated, and incredibly pissed at my doctor’s office. If they’d found the tumor three years earlier, I could have kept my uterus and had a child,” says Baze, now 39 years old and executive director of the Yellow Umbrella, a cervical cancer prevention group she founded in 2002.
It borders on the scandalous that cervical cancer, among the few cancers that are preventable, kills 310,000 women a year worldwide. In 2007, 11,150 women in the U.S. were diagnosed with it. Half of them had not had a recent Pap test. Another third did get tested but got false negatives from the 65-year-old Papanicolaou biopsy. The Pap test is valuable, having cut the rate of cervical cancer by 70%, but it is archaic. It calls on a lab technician or machine to peer at a daub of cervical cells under a microscope to spot the abnormal precancerous ones. This artisanal approach yields false negatives between 13% and 45% of the time…
http://www.forbes.com/free_for…
If you read the article carefully, the genetic test wouldn’t totally eliminate cervical cancer but it would make it almost as rare as intelligence in a Republican.
It is hardly the only cancer that could be detected and cured early with newer screening methods but what do we care? Not much money in that compared to treating cancer.
Best, Terry
Nov 23 2007
Room of Doom
I passed by that Room of Doom every day for two weeks when I was working at an odd job between classes.
It was a terrible place but when I first went by I had no reason to know the terror lurking within.
Parents brought their children to that room. The children had received a death sentence that no lawyer could mitigate. The children had received a diagnosis of juvenile leukemia. There was no cure, not even a treatment. All that waited for the children was an early painful death.
Sep 29 2007
Reconciliation. A revisit and an update.
I'm revisiting a previous piece of writing from August of last year. Today is my oldest sister's birthday – Jackie would have been 71 years old, born September 28, 1936. Midst of the Great Depression, midpoint between the Great Crash of 1929 and the final year of WWII, 1945.
In reading through this again, I realize that I wrote it as if I knew her. But really, how can a much younger sister, only a teenager so many years ago, know a sibling who is in their middle thirties? I write with a great deal of supposition as I carry the anecdotal memories of the other parts of my family forward. Most of all these last few years, I listened to the sometimes faulty, often biased, almost always self-focused stories of my other sister, Sharon. I heard her side of things, and sometimes her perspective filled in gaps in the hollows of the family legends initially created for me by my mother. Sometimes Sharon's words served to underline the inequalities of family dynamics. A family organic pulses in that way – the web that connects us as family is either nourished or fermented by how each of us share memories or opinions with each other.