I wrote a post a few weeks back talking about how unsettled I was feeling as a result of people I know either getting diagnosed with their first bout of cancer or a recurrence. At my age, you know that it’s only a matter of time you start hearing news like this. But it doesn’t make it any easier to know that people you grew up with are now wrestling with their own cancer diagnoses.
I come from a smallish town that seems to have a suspiciously large number of cancer cases in my age bracket. Oh sure, the EPA came in and said that it wasn’t enough to warrant calling it a cancer cluster and that the diagnosis rate was “statistically normal”, whatever the hell that means. And the annoying thing is they only surveyed people who currently live in the town, not the people who lived there as children during a certain time period and then moved away. I had about 800 people in my high school at any given time. And there have been a number of people I knew from that time period who have been diagnosed with cancers of the breast, brain, stomach, liver, and yes, skin. Some of these cases of weird aggressive cancers occurred when the person was in their 20s. We had a lot of heavy industry operating on the far west side of town. We had soot, fallout ash and particulates covering pretty much surface of anything left outside for more than an hour. We swam in a lake that was so polluted that I’m surprised we didn’t glow in the dark afterwards. We had one exciting night when the aluminum plant blew up and lit up the sky for hours as explosions and fire raged on (it was apparently the poor man’s mid-latitude version of the Northern Lights). Despite the assurances of the governmental agency tasked with making sure our air and water were safe to consume, I’m not exactly sure that the town’s children in my formative years were done any favors by being exposed to a cocktail of pollutants that were never mitigated or even identified by a very pro-industry “watchdog”.
Not to get all Erin Brockovich because quite frankly, the town grew up to be a very desirable place to live. Oh sure, the industrial area of town has fallen largely silent as the factories pulled up stakes and moved offshore in the 90s. The resulting hit to the tax base makes it more expensive to maintain the great schools and services. The tradeoff is that the air and water are lightyears cleaner than it used to be. But the promoters of the town will put horseheads in your bed if you so much as breathe a concern about why so many people from my generation have so many cases of cancer before we hit 50.
So there are a few more people I grew up with that now have to go through their own battles with cancer. And I wonder how many more will go through this… and worry that there won’t be any of us left for a 50th reunion.