Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Beating Cancer With 140 Characters

Started digging into this tweeting for cancer thing.

Smacked my head right up against some heavy words.

"The truth is there is a thin line between having it all and losing it all. And it is on that line we balance, listening, always, for the low hum of the terrifying possible."

That was written by Francesca Kaplan Grossman in support of Lisa Bonchek Adams, who is the woman tweeting her cancer experience to the world.

Adams is suffering from Stage IV metastatic breast cancer and is tweeting liberally about the experience.

She has met with strange resistance from Bill Keller and his wife Emma. Bill wrote a column for The Times, Emma posted her opinion in The Guardian, both of them criticizing Lisa for going so public with her feelings.

First of all it cracks me up that, with so much garbage out there in cyberspace, so many meaningless words, so much wasted time, when someone puts something human out there, however uncomfortable, they are criticized.

We are perfectly comfortable talking about the most banal topics in the world but God forbid you should put something out there that people can sink their teeth into. Make them think, make them reflect, make them feel.

I think the sharing of pain might be one of the most powerful things we can do. Everyone is in pain and everyone buries it deep; it might be helpful for some battered, lonely human soul to read someone else's words, even if all it does is to make them feel less alone.

In addition we are such cowards about death in this country. We don't want to acknowledge it, we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to hear about it.

This is not healthy, it is not realistic. I read a book called "Denial of Death" written by Ernest Becker, in which he theorizes that our denial of death is at the root of all of our psychological problems.

I think he is on to something there.

I also think it's good to publicize how our esteemed medical community handles someone's treatment. Treatment that determines if they live or die and how they will live or die.

I have been dealing with a pinched nerve in my neck for coming up on 3 months now. Something so small, so basic, so seemingly simple. Yet I have still not received a comprehensive diagnosis telling me exactly what is going on. Only theories and various approaches to treating the situation.

And that is for a pinched nerve, for Christ sake.

Consider the possibilities when dealing with cancer. Endless. The docs need to be monitored.

My brother-in-law just had his second operation on his brain in a fight against cancer. They bounced him out of the hospital after a few days and sent him to rehab. His ever vigilant wife caught the people there about to give him a drug that he should not be taking.

She explained why and they responded: "Oh, we didn't read his chart."

Gives you a warm feeling, doesn't it?

Needless to say, Sarge was out of there that very day.

I just realized I am just scratching the surface here. This was a gut purge on a topic I have been marinating in my brain.

I need to dig deeper.

But today is Day One of "The Return to The Asylum". I am tired and I gotta get moving.

Talk to you later.

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