April 12, 2006 - Day 1 - Week 2 - Partial Melt Down

Not a big meltdown, but sleepy all day.  Maybe it was my choice of reading.  I caught up on articles about climate change and global warming.  That choice is common today because of the guests on Earth Talk Today.  In two weeks I will interview Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, a leading scientist on sea level rise and the impact of global warming on the earth.  Usually I get all worked up, run around the house asking Katy to look at this or look at that, but today I read and napped.

Or, maybe it was because I took an Ambien, 5 mg. as a sleep aid last night. Doctor recommended.  The only other sleeping tablet ever taken was when we went to visit Laura when she studied in New South Wales Australia and I took 10 mg on the plane.  Never moved a muscle for 8 hours.  Tonight I will take 2 ½ mg. at 6pm. so that I won’t doze off during breakfast.  Sleep is important, but not all day. 

Reading good science when I was awake lead me to thinking about cancer and the environment from a different perspective altogether.  Have we become complacent about both because the issue is all pervasive and so over-whelming that inertia has set in? Is the glaze over look experienced frequently because of cancer’s ubiquitous nature?  Cancer appears to be everywhere!

It has been interesting to observe that everyone has a cancer story, and much of the reaction has been, so what is the big deal, isn’t everyone going to have to deal with it one day?  Peter it’s your turn now, and then others think that it will be a brother’s turn or my mom’s turn, and on and on.  We have accepted the inevitability of cancer as family after family joins the ranks of the initiated.  Cultural conditioning has taken over and it is accepted as an inevitable part of life.  Granted we are saddened when we hear the news of another friend or loved one contracting cancer, but we seem to take it in stride.  I don’t mean to judge behavior here, but simply to observe how commonplace this reaction really is.

In a similar fashion, when I read that sea level rise may wipe out Pacific Islands and major cities like London, New York and Miami by the year 2080 I have a tendency to go into the posture of that’s what we will get if we just keep doing what we are doing.  Business as usual  and the unintended consequences appear to be something I can do little to rectify.

I guess the emotion called anguish best describes how I feel about all of this.  We need to get at the root causes of cancer, period!  It is all well and good for great treatments and protocols after the onset, but I am anguished over the lack of a collective voice echoing why, why do we get cancer?  In similar fashion, I ask, why, why is the environment collapsing at such a rate? This makes my heart sad.

Perhaps we might want to look at the idea of clean up the environment, cure cancer.

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