Bad Mood Rising

It's been a rough few days. I've hated everyone. Yes, probably you too ... maybe not you ... but that guy over there, yeah, him, I hated him. It all seems to hit in waves. Most of the time I'm okay with this whole thing, like when I'm not being poked with a needle or rolled through a machine ("Are you claustrophobic?" "Does it matter?"), but then sometimes we'll be walking through Costco and I'll listen to crap that comes out of people's mouths ("Look, honey! Honey! This says it's organic!") and look at people's dead sheep faces and I want to slap them around. Why don't YOU have cancer, mother-f---er?

But, when I'm calm again, I think not only about how wrong that is, but also about how many people out there really do have cancer. Maybe the dead sheep faced people have it and just don't know it yet, because the one thing I hear from everyone -- co-workers, family, the woman who cut my hair -- is how someone they know just went through this. Even I know someone who just went through this.

So the question is not why did I strike it lucky, but why did it take so long to happen? It seems inevitable that someone you know will have cancer. Okay, why that person is me, yeah, sure, that bugs me when my blood sugar is low and I hear "experts" put it down to lack of exercise and obesity, neither of which I have, as well as other "risk factors" like being a woman. But, the point is with these kinds of odds against you, it's amazing to me that people freak out about catching H1N1. I don't know anyone --- even friends of friends or family of friends or friends of the woman who cut my hair --- who had H1N1. But 5 people die of it and the store is suddenly sold out of hand sanitizer. 30,000,000 women get breast cancer and you still can't convince anyone to go in and get a mammogram --- know why? Because it hurts, that's why. Gel sanitizer, on the other hand, is quite nice.

The solutions? Just fix the machines. If we can put a man on the moon we can come up with something a little more like gel sanitizer for cancer. I know, why don't you technicians try this stuff out yourself? How about a nice, safe radioactive MUGA scan? Sit in a tilted chair for 20 minutes with a giant block of metal against your chest and your left arm losing sensation because it's been propped up over your head for half an hour. Like it? Or, better yet, have a mammogram.