If The Other Nasties Don't Get You...

If the other big nasty doesn't get you, count on cancer to do the honors.

A little over a quarter of all deaths in 2009 were from some flavor of heart disease, and a little under a quarter of all deaths were from some flavor of cancer. Interesting side note: a number of chemotherapies can cause cardiomyopathy, but fortunately not all of them, and in many cases the heart is able to recover from it. Some chemotherapies cause heart attack during infusion, although this is very rare.

What does that number mean to you? The strong, sad likelihood that you will get to experience the pain directly or by watching someone close to you die from cancer or its complications.

I'm not trying to get you down. I just want you to know how common it is. That's the death figure, by the way. The total number of folks who get diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime is closer to half. I say diagnosed because there are still people who die never knowing they have it.

My wife's had cancer since 2004, or at least she was diagnosed then, after she found a lump in her thigh. She'd probably had it for longer than that. She had a couple of years of clean scans after her first set of treatments (chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery) before it metastasized and took up residence in her lungs. If one of us makes the mistake of telling someone she has lung cancer instead of saying synovial sarcoma, the first question is almost always an immediate, "Did she smoke?" It is frustrating and annoying, but it's a thing you hear and you rewind your past experience to try and remember if you'd asked similar questions of folks in the past.

A lot of the myriad forms of the disease called cancer don't have a directly attributable environmental or lifestyle-related cause. Some do, and you hear about them all the time (mesothelioma, anyone?) Some folks have genetic predisposition for certain types of cancers. There are also some cancers caused by infections from specific organisms or viruses (HPV). What it all boils down to for someone dealing with cancer is an assumption by others that conforms to the just-world fallacy. Most people with cancer did nothing to cause it. This is one of the frustrations of hearing "Did she smoke?" from people. No she didn't. She did nothing to deserve her disease. Almost everyone with a cancer did nothing in particular to get it, or if they did, they did so before the cause was documented.

Keep that in mind the next time you talk to someone with a cancer. You might also consider that you have a one in four chance of dying from a cancer of your own and at least a one in three chance of being diagnosed at some point in your lifetime. I'm not wishing it on anyone, but the big bad universe has plans of its own.