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I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

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Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#331

Post by bjarneh »

ehnto wrote: post #134
bjarneh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The skin cancer + flight attendant connection has to be due to white people working in the industry. People tend to fly to places with plenty of sun and warm climates. Australia's skin cancer rates are also very high, although not so much among the aboriginal population.

I would imagine it's because of the increased radiation you receive during a flight. For one flight, it's negligible, but if it's your job to be in the stratosphere for 20+ hours a shift, year round, it will probably start to add up. It would be like spending all your work life on the beach.

> It would be like spending all your work life on the beach.

This is where flight attendants spend their non-work life :-)

The radiation from the flight could be a factor of course; but being from Norway myself, and getting burned like a cooked lobster every time I go to Spain etc. I can't imagine that stuff being healthy to do regularly (or perhaps at all).

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#332

Post by moonshinefe »

deergomoo wrote: post #324

I was diagnosed with lymphoma at 24. While chemo isn’t fun (and if I ever have another lumbar puncture in my life it’ll be too soon), the mental side was much harder than the physical for me. I needed inpatient treatment, so from probably August until just before Christmas I was mostly in hospital, with the occasional week or two break. By the end I was having people bring me McDonald’s most days, because the idea of…

Hey, I never had that significant of an experience but I spent some weeks in the hospital myself in my 20s-early 30s and I can relate at least somewhat. It does get depressing. For me it was being next to someone in chronic pain crying out for hours every day and that's all you're around the entire time, in addition to the lack of sleep. The food thing doesn't sound silly at all to me. Hospitals are a depressing place after a while.

Anyway thanks for sharing and I hope you're recovered.

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#333

Post by throwaway22032 »

Turfie wrote: post #286
m12k wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I think about cancer: Each and every one of us is playing Russian roulette daily with a revolver with a giant drum with tens of thousands of empty slots and a single bullet. And some people load more bullets in the drum by smoking, drinking, getting sunburned, other risky behavior or just losing the genetic lottery. At the end of the day, the outcome is still random. You'll still come across chain smokers tha…

It's never random. All is just a process of causes and conditions, albeit a very complex one. We just can't track all the variables.

Sure, in the same sense that a roulette table or a deck of shuffled cards isn't actually random, it's just cause and effect.

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#334

Post by necovek »

IMTDb wrote: post #261
pas wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally mandating remote work and adding public transit options and raising the cost of daily useless commute would go a veeeeeery long way. Because the petrol not burned by driving can be used to replace the coal plants.

I think you are overestimating the amount of jobs that can be done remotely. Things that can never be done remotely: agriculture, construction, manufacture, hospitality, a big part of health/elder care, a big part of education, anything that requires expensive equipment (research, ...), artists/shows/events, the list goes on. A lot of these sectors were either closed or running slow during COVID, which was not sustai…

Not to go into each of your counter-examples, but while some of them can't be done remotely today, surely we can get there.

Eg. how far away are we from having remote-controlled tractors and combine-harvesters? Sure, get them home into a garage when they need servicing.

Hospitality? There are places which, especially in the first pandemic year, have gone all hands-off (eg. get a token to access a property on your check-in without talking to anyone).

But rather than can we, I think the point should be should we? There's a psychological cost to working with people you've never met personally, never hanged around with... And some people will struggle to get any social activity happening in their lives without work.

I've worked remotely for 15+ years, but I don't think it's for everybody, or for anybody all the time.

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#335

Post by catchclose8919 »

paulcole wrote: post #322
codeflow2202 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy. Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), sm…

> This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live. Imagine you’re completely wrong about this — because it’s a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in. What’s another answer for why Belgians seem to get cancer more often than Italians?

> a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in

Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after...

Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#336

Post by kuhewa »

kiba wrote: post #329
jll29 wrote: post #279

First of all, I'm sorry to learn the author got cancer; I wish her all the best and continued strength. Many contributors have already made good suggestions how to reduce the risk of getting cancer, or how to deal with it; but I found most posts quite _technical_. Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold. The human body sooner or later is bound to decay, which pretty much starts once one…

for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life. No. Living longer means we have to live with our decisions. People who live short lives don't have to live with decisions…

> followed by heat dissipation because humans are all 100 watts space heaters.

Well that's an.. interesting take

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#337

Post by altcognito »

giantg2 wrote: post #311
jll29 wrote: post #279

First of all, I'm sorry to learn the author got cancer; I wish her all the best and continued strength. Many contributors have already made good suggestions how to reduce the risk of getting cancer, or how to deal with it; but I found most posts quite _technical_. Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold. The human body sooner or later is bound to decay, which pretty much starts once one…

"eventually will wipe any individual out." Sure, eventually. It's one thing if people are getting cancer or having heart attacks later in life. It's a little concerning when a fairly large number of younger people are afflicted. The rate of cancer has risen about 30% for young people since the seventies. So it seems that there's something wrong in our environment or lifestyles that could be increasing risk. That's ve…

From the article: Better detection is also a likely contributor.

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#338

Post by catchclose8919 »

codeflow2202 wrote: post #312
catchclose8919 wrote: post #204

This is one of the things where it matters more how healthy/unpolluted your environment is . I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole. I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution ser…

This. I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy. Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), sm…

...eh, it's the fries, trust me ;)

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#339

Post by paraschopra »

Turfie wrote: post #286
m12k wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I think about cancer: Each and every one of us is playing Russian roulette daily with a revolver with a giant drum with tens of thousands of empty slots and a single bullet. And some people load more bullets in the drum by smoking, drinking, getting sunburned, other risky behavior or just losing the genetic lottery. At the end of the day, the outcome is still random. You'll still come across chain smokers tha…

It's never random. All is just a process of causes and conditions, albeit a very complex one. We just can't track all the variables.

It's random for all practical purposes if you can't figure out the causes.

Re: I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

#340

Post by tremon »

giantg2 wrote: post #320
EL_Loco wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Each car is like one mini factory spewing out its exhaust into the air.

But those mini factories have gotten much cleaner over the years, yet we still see a 30% increase in young adult cancers over 1970s levels. So while it's a potential contributor, it seems there could be more at play. Edit: why downvote?

How much cleaner have they gotten, and how much more miles do these factories get driven? Taking a look at https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles (the first useful result I could find), highway vehicle miles have almost tripled since the 1970s (1.1 trillion miles in 1970 vs 3.2 in 2019). Have cars gotten 70% cleaner in the same timespan?
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