What can we do to save our dogs? May 2, 2012
Posted by ourfriendben in pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: cancer, dog cancer, dogs, Dr. David Agus, rise in cancer, rise in dog cancer, The End of Illness
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Silence Dogood here. I just received an e-mail update from our local paper, the Allentown PA Morning Call, with the pitiful headline “Bone cancer claims Allentown police dog ‘Sem’.” The first sentence: “[The] Allentown Police Department hoped its police dog Sem would officially retire during its annual commendations ceremony on May 16, but the German Shepherd’s health quickly deteriorated after being diagnosed last week with with bone cancer…” Sem was ten years old.
In an unrelated story, I read just this morning that cancer is the #1 disease-related killer of dogs. Our friend Ben and I don’t need convincing. Our first golden retriever, Annie, died a slow, agonizing death of bone cancer at just 2 1/2; our second, our beloved Molly, died of liver cancer, like Sem at age ten. Not a day goes by that I don’t look at our adored black German shepherd, Shiloh, just turned three, and pray that she isn’t also a victim of this dreadful fate. No dog—no person, no creature—should have to suffer as our Annie and Molly suffered.
Cancer is the terror of our times. Preeminent oncologist Dr. David Agus in his groundbreaking book The End of Illness points out that, of all major diseases, the only one whose death rate has held steady over the past 50 years is cancer. His graph shows precipitous drops in death from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and every other major illness; the death rate from cancer is a straight line.
Dr. Agus’s prediction about how many of us will be stricken with cancer at some point during our lives is terrifying. I know that, as a woman, I live in constant terror of developing breast cancer. Relatives have been diagnosed with stomach, liver, colon, lung, and pancreatic cancer, melanoma, leukemia, and lymphoma.
As far as I can tell, treatments are barbaric, debilitating, and ineffective, only postponing death (often for a very short time) at the price of all quality of life. (This is not true in the case of a contained tumor that can simply be surgically removed without radiation or chemo. These lucky folks quickly regain vitality and quality of life, and often, like my Grandma, live full, long lives after their surgery.)
I constantly read reports of how this is all our fault: Our horrific diets and sedentary but high-stress lifestyles are responsible for our cancer. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. As far as I can see, in dogs as in people, cancer turns a blind eye toward lifestyle, exercise, personality, and diet. Our Molly was a happy-go-lucky, stress-free dog with an active lifestyle and zero junk in her diet. Annie was a quiet, mellow dog who’d been given the best high-quality care all her life. I put the blame for cancer squarely where it belongs: on the corporations and agribusinesses who are spewing toxic chemicals all over us and our world.
It’s not us, but the good folks who’ve polluted our air, food, homes, and water that are killing us and our pets. The folks who build nuclear plants, cellphone towers, and electric lines near our homes. The folks who spend millions to put chemical “air fresheners” and industrial-strength chemical cleaners in our cars, schools, and houses. The folks who spray their fields (and our food) with tons of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and convince us with beaucoup publicity dollars to do the same to our lawns and gardens. The folks who successfully market atrocities like Lucky Charms snack bars, Pop-Tarts, and KooKies cereal.
The ultimate horror is that, whatever we do, we can’t escape our toxic environment, and neither can our dogs. We can eat the most wholesome organic diet, drink the most pure spring water, and live the healthiest lifestyle possible, but we cannot avoid the toxic pollution that we breathe and bathe in and that surrounds us at work and, too often, at home, thanks to our modern building materials. (And not just modern, either: Remember lead paint, asbestos shingles, lead pipes, and coal stoves.)
At least we can try to minimize our exposure, to live healthy lives, to eat healthy diets. And at least we can read up on the risks and make our own choices about how to counter them, giving us some sense of empowerment. Our poor dogs simply get sick. We try to give them good, healthy, loving lives. We try to do everything we can for them once they’re diagnosed. On their part, they try to hide their suffering from us as best they can to spare our suffering. (This is doubtless why a highly disciplined police dog like Sem was able to hide his bone cancer until a week before he died.)
I have read that doctors, given a choice, overwhelmingly choose quality of life over radiation and chemotherapy when they themselves are diagnosed with cancer. They know how pointless the suffering caused by both treatments ultimately is. They opt for living however much life is left to them to the fullest rather than suffering endless, and ultimately pointless, agony. I honor them for that choice and wish they’d pass it on to the public rather than continuing to dose everyone with ineffective poisons because we’ve come to expect that doctors can cure us of everything, statistics to the contrary.
It takes great bravery to face up to a cancer diagnosis. I’m a coward, and can’t even imagine how I’d react. But I’ve never seen such bravery, selflessness, and courage as I did when our Annie and Molly faced their final battles. All their thoughts were on us, on shielding us from their suffering, on sparing us from suffering. I have never before or since encountered such greatness of mind and heart.
I’m no activist, but I would rip my own heart out and eat it if it meant that not one other animal ever died of cancer. That not one pet, not one person, was attacked by cancer, the ultimate betrayal: the body turning against itself, literally consuming itself.
And believe me, I would love to see the executives of the Monsantos and the factory-farm-friendly McDonalds and the nuclear plants of this world be forced to consume the deadly products they create, to breathe them, to drink them, in memory of my Molly, my Annie, my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews. In memory of Sem.
What can we do to save our dogs?
‘Til next time,
Silence
A different kind of card. July 30, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: cancer, greeting cards, Hallmark, Shoebox
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Silence Dogood here. Our friend Ben and I had stopped at the nearest CVS the other day, since he needed poison ivy meds and I needed a birthday card for my soon-to-be 12-year-old niece. While OFB headed back to the pharmaceutical aisles, I went to check out the numerous card racks. And I got quite a shock.
Last time I’d looked, just weeks ago, there’d been the usual array of occasion cards (birthday, wedding, anniversary, graduation, confirmation, promotion, retirement, moving), holiday cards (Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Assistant’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving), and general (sympathy, friendship, love, get well, pets, inspiration, religious, blank). True, these were divided into seemingly millions of categories, including age, price, and whether or not you wanted them to be tied to some celebrity and/or make noise. But though the formats changed, the categories remained pretty much the same.
This time, however, everything had changed. There was a whole new, prominently placed, area of cards from Hallmark’s Shoebox collection. There wasn’t a header over the section, no giant banner that said “Oh, God!” But that was my reaction when I looked at the new card categories: post-surgery, chemotherapy (“5 reasons why it’s great to lose your hair”), cancer survivor, even a Susan G. Komen breast cancer card.
As I looked at Hannah Montana, Barbie, and Pirates of the Caribbean birthday cards for my niece Mary, chuckled over Maxine cards, and tried to keep OFB from playing every Homer Simpson sound card on the racks, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “reality” cards on the opposite wall. Cancer, the terror of our time. Cancer treatment, even more terrifying for many.
What really disturbs me most about all this is that I can find no way to dismiss them. Hallmark is a very savvy company and does a ton of market research. If Hallmark has decided there’s a need for these cards, that customers are ready to come out in the open and buy cards that talk openly about cancer and chemotherapy rather than treating them as isolated hush-hush situations, then that says that cancer and chemotherapy have become so commonplace that there’s now a substantial market for cancer-themed cards.
Not that I’ve ever doubted it. Sometimes I feel like I’m waging a one-woman campaign to say that cancer is rampant in our society, is our #1 killer. No, no, it’s heart disease, the statisticians insist. I beg to differ. There are bazillion kinds of cancer, and many of them kill over a very, very long time. We’re not trying to compare cancer to a heart attack that fells its victim with one blow. Oh, no, no. If you added up all the victims of all the kinds of cancer, and then followed them until they eventually died of cancer, after however many remissions, you’d have statistics that would keep all Americans, not just me, lying awake at night.
I’ve long been convinced that cancer—such a rarity in the past, even in the early 20th century, that it was considered an event to even diagnose it—is the killer of our time. Not heart disease, not diabetes, not Alzheimer’s, not AIDS, frightening as they all are. Like a consummate actor who takes the stage in endless guises, cancer is the death star of our day.
All the pink ribbons on cars, clothes, and return-address labels, the yellow “Live Strong” wrist bands, should be enough to convince us. But if not, here are the greeting cards, the ones that tell us to put our feet up after surgery or tell people we’re pirates because we’re wearing bandannas to cover our chemo-balded skulls or live every post-cancer-diagnosis day as a gift.
Mercy. Could America finally take these cards as a wake-up call and do real, comprehensive statistics analysis on the toll cancer is wreaking on our population? Tell us outright the number of annual diagnoses of all kinds of cancer, the number of annual deaths from all kinds of cancer—however long ago they were diagnosed—and the likelihood of an American getting some kind of cancer during the course of his or her life? These are the statistics I’d like—no, need—to hear.
And then, when the horrific tallies are finally done, I’d like to know when the farmers and factories and food manufacturers are going to stop poisoning our land, water, air, and food with cancer-causing chemicals. And when the medical establishment is going to stop trying to tell us that we’re giving ourselves cancer by not eating right, losing weight, and exercising: It’s all our fault. Thanks, guys.
Obviously, we’ll be healthier overall if we’re fit, eat organic food, drink filtered water, avoid toxic habits like smoking, and live in an area with low levels of pollution, as opposed to breathing taxi exhaust and God knows what else every day in a large city. Doing all that, and skipping the fried chicken, onion rings, doughnuts, and the like might indeed be enough to prevent diabetes and heart disease. But not cancer.
Cancer is a cumulative disease: It takes a while for there to be enough damage to the cells, enough free radicals loose in the system, to get it going. And I’m convinced that all the healthy habits we can develop aren’t enough to offset the sea of chemical toxins we swim in all day, every day, wherever we live. Look at Lance Armstrong: Not your typical couch potato, yet being one of the world’s premier athletes didn’t protect him from cancer. We can run, but in an era of global pollution, we can’t hide: I’ll bet even Antarctica has measurable levels of chemical toxins.
So rather than blaming us for falling ill, I’d like to see those responsible take the blame for killing us off, not by being punished, but by being made responsible for cleaning up their mess. If the major thrust of modern research was to find truly viable alternatives to the toxic chemicals that are still considered essential in every aspect of our lives, from making plumbing pipes and buildings to the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the batteries we use in all our “essential” electronic devices, I am confident that human ingenuity would prevail. If the government, or the Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts of the world, created a prestigious and valuable prize awarded annually, like the Nobel Prizes, to those who had come up with the most viable ways to clean up our poor planet, I’m sure our brightest and best would devote their minds and energies towards our world’s salvation and our own. If the medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies were given a mandate to find ways to actually prevent and actually cure cancer, perhaps we’d see breakthroughs that didn’t involve poisoning people in order to give them a few more years of dubious quality.
I would really like to see this happen. Because if it doesn’t, I can’t believe that some day, people won’t be heading to CVS to buy those cards for me.
‘Til next time,
Silence
Poor Richard's Almanac 