 |
| The appendage in question. The receding nipple is "very bad". There's also a weird dimple in the lower part -- all things I didn't notice until January. |
On Friday night, May 6th, at about 2am I was trapped on the Hamster Wheel of Terror.
I kept pondering the fact my Mom had been a heavy smoker. From about age five until age 19, I was bathed in a continuous cloud of second-hand smoke from her Pall Mall reds. She smoked a half a pack a night and was hopelessly addicted to nicotine. Half of our teenager/parent arguments were about me opening the windows in our apartment to air it out in winter when the temp averaged 15F (-9C). I was on antihistamines continuously from age 11 to 16. At age 15, I couldn't jog half a lap around the high school track. Take that Penn & Teller.
Weirdly, my Mom never got breast cancer despite the eternal toxin bath. She died of pneumonia and was "emphysemic as hell" as one relative put it. But still, I think her mother had gone a round with breast cancer back in the draconian 1940s. And she made it to age 67, dying seven years before I was born.
My Dad had been a smoker as well. He didn't smoke as much as my Mom and he usually smoked a pipe but there were more than a few times he drove my brother and me out of the room with his exuberant tobacco puffing. Still, summers at his house were a lot less toxic as my Dad and step-mother usually smoked outside in their expansive backyard.
Growing up in Nevada, I spent half my adolescence walking through casinos where the air was blue with second-hand smoke.
Next up on the Fear Hit List: was it some vitamin or herbal supplement I took in the past? I have friends younger and older than me -- svelte distance runners scarfing obscure herbal supplements and sedentary Millennials who never say no to hamburgers -- and none have cancer.
How about that time I worked on a Forest Service timber-marking crew in 2003? I was coated in marking paint mist for four months. One of my coworkers dumped an entire plastic bottle of DEET on his hard hat because the mosquitos were indescribable in southern Colorado. On hot days at 8,200 ft above sea level, if we didn't wear long-sleeved shirts and dowse ourselves in DEET twice a day we'd be covered in bites.
Or what about the fact I lived in a basement apartment from early 1989 until May 1991? My former hometown, Reno, sits on the east edge of the Sierra Nevadas, an area full of radon gas. And again in 2015 I rented a basement room in a tiny house in Vancouver, Washington. Was I getting exposed to radon gas then?
Anti-vaxxers just fuck right off because my left breast was put on a "watch out" situation after a slightly abnormal mammogram in March 2015. This was six years before Covid and seven years before any vaccine.
What about all the toxins I've been exposed to in all the crap, minimum-wage jobs I've worked? I remember standing ankle deep in photographic processing chemicals in 1990. Or the first time I worked for the Forest Service in 1996 and had to cut pressure-treated lumber with a chainsaw for two days? No dust masks, nothing to protect my airways or face.
From 2019 to mid-2020, during the middle of the pandemic, I worked in an electrical engineering lab that tests aerospace parts. They were nonchalant about possible beryllium particles drifting through the sealed building. I am now the forth former employee who has developed cancer.
Or maybe it was way back, growing up in rural northeastern Nevada downwind of the covert sub-critical testing the military did outside of Fallon?
It could have been any of these things, some of them, or none. Okay that's enough Hamster Wheel of Terror.
