Photo by Frank Jang. Recent data released from the National Cancer Institute confirms that San Francisco has the highest rate of liver cancer in the nation. It is the gateway for immigrants from Asian countries where there is a high prevalence of hepatitis B. San Francisco Hep B Free is a unique collaboration of over 50 private and public organizations whose goal is to turn San Francisco into the first hepatitis B free city nationwide.
Hepatitis B infection causes up to 80 percent of liver cancers worldwide. This million dollar ad campaign will appear in ethnic and local newspapers, billboards, bus shelters for the month of May.
TV commercials were also produced and will receive wide exposure on Comcast cable, broadcast and Asian television stations. If you're sucking on two packs of Camels a day, riding your motorcycle without a helmet, downing a bottle of Wild Turkey every night or having unprotected sex, you're almost assuredly going to face consequences. In my life I've lost three family members to smoking, including my uncle, who died of emphysema just last month. The choices he made over the years had a very direct effect, culminating in his current residence in a coffin instead of a nice little house near his three grown children.
But you know what? He's just as dead as someone who never smoked a day and died of lung cancer anyway. That loss is just as real and painful to his family. And we put ourselves on very shaky moral ground when we create hierarchies of compassion, when we decide that, say, breast cancer is nobler than lung cancer, or that HIV contracted from a mother during childbirth is innocent, but HIV contracted from sex is your own damn fault.
Earlier this week, I was sitting in a waiting room at Sloan-Kettering, downing a massive jug of contrast dye before a CT scan and making chitchat with my fellow patients and the family members who were by their sides.
She looked me up and down and asked the question I've heard repeatedly over the last two years. I've never had a tan in my life. But the sun bore a hole in the top of my head anyway. Melanoma loves scalps and the tops of ears and the backs of necks and eyelids; it can attack the inside of your eyes and places where the sun never shines at all. As my doctor told me when I went in for treatment Thursday, "We still don't know how all the factors, like genetics and environment, work.
That's why I tell everyone who will listen to wear sunscreen and a hat. That's also why I would not wish what I've been through on anyone. As far as I'm concerned, you can be as orange as Patricia Krentcil and you still haven't earned the experience of wondering how your children would remember you if you died this year.
When I go to my weekly support group, I sit with people who have a broad variety of cancers. To the outside world, maybe some of us seem more meritorious than others.
Yet worthiness isn't a condition of having things happen in your life. Life doesn't play fair that way. Absolutely, you can improve your odds.
You should. So lock your doors and buckle your seat belt and wear your sunscreen and use condoms. Please don't smoke, because it really is very bad for you. You'll be a happier, saner, safer person if you love yourself enough to take good care of yourself.
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