very good points....more cancer stuff....
This is excerpted from Mike Taibbi's article on msnbc.com:
"In the weeks after I quit, my friends, family and colleagues rallied around me, and I was touched. I’d get these e-mails saying “Call me!” if I had an urge to light up. Once, rushing into my office on deadline, I found a package on my desk with a card taped to it: “Thought I’d buy you the next few rounds.” It was from a colleague, a two-month supply of quit-smoking patches.
It turned out I didn’t need them. I was done smoking, though I’d really just begun to think about it. And about how the relatively paltry funding for lung cancer research suffers from the impact of smoker’s guilt - the "we bring it on ourselves" lament that even Peter referenced in his very last broadcast, saying he’d “been weak” and had gone back to smoking after 9/11. Less than 1/10th of the research dollars spent on breast cancer are spent on lung cancer per death, for example. I thought about how there’ve been few celebrity-led commercial campaigns for lung-cancer research - because so few lung cancer patients, only about 15 percent, have a five-year survival rate or ever get healthy enough again to lead the fund-raising charge or the next 5K run.
So 160,000 Americans died of lung cancer last year, at least as many will be newly diagnosed this year, and unless its next victim is a Peter Jennings or Dana Reeve - who would also be taken by the disease - it remains a largely invisible mass killer whose opponents have no champion or spokesperson, and whose cures and treatments seem as distant or feeble as ever."
This falls in with what I keep saying. As frustrated as I get with all the attention on breast cancer, *I* am not an activist. I don't have it in me. A lot of people don't. We don't have our champions or spokespeople.
BUT - I, at the very least, am so incredibly lucky to have friends who care about me and want to help me. The LimeProject and LimeSuckers is getting Hodgkin's out there. It will indirectly help other people, too.
"In the weeks after I quit, my friends, family and colleagues rallied around me, and I was touched. I’d get these e-mails saying “Call me!” if I had an urge to light up. Once, rushing into my office on deadline, I found a package on my desk with a card taped to it: “Thought I’d buy you the next few rounds.” It was from a colleague, a two-month supply of quit-smoking patches.
It turned out I didn’t need them. I was done smoking, though I’d really just begun to think about it. And about how the relatively paltry funding for lung cancer research suffers from the impact of smoker’s guilt - the "we bring it on ourselves" lament that even Peter referenced in his very last broadcast, saying he’d “been weak” and had gone back to smoking after 9/11. Less than 1/10th of the research dollars spent on breast cancer are spent on lung cancer per death, for example. I thought about how there’ve been few celebrity-led commercial campaigns for lung-cancer research - because so few lung cancer patients, only about 15 percent, have a five-year survival rate or ever get healthy enough again to lead the fund-raising charge or the next 5K run.
So 160,000 Americans died of lung cancer last year, at least as many will be newly diagnosed this year, and unless its next victim is a Peter Jennings or Dana Reeve - who would also be taken by the disease - it remains a largely invisible mass killer whose opponents have no champion or spokesperson, and whose cures and treatments seem as distant or feeble as ever."
This falls in with what I keep saying. As frustrated as I get with all the attention on breast cancer, *I* am not an activist. I don't have it in me. A lot of people don't. We don't have our champions or spokespeople.
BUT - I, at the very least, am so incredibly lucky to have friends who care about me and want to help me. The LimeProject and LimeSuckers is getting Hodgkin's out there. It will indirectly help other people, too.