Resilience: Recovering our health
I’ll never forget my mom’s first words as she was wheeled out of surgery to remove a lump from her breast: “It’s malignant. But it isn’t hereditary. You and your sister will be okay.” I’ve spent a lot of time since that day thinking about cancer and the things that cause it — initially for my mother, my siblings and myself, now increasingly for my three kids. At the time, the news was full of “risk factors”— the message being that a woman could lower her cancer risks by doing things like staying slim, exercising and avoiding alcohol. A much less publi-cized fact, namely that only 30% of women who get breast cancer actually have ANY of the risk factors, means that 7 of the 10 women who are doing everything they’re “suppo-sed” to be doing to avoid breast cancer are getting it anyway. If altering my lifestyle isn’t going to determine whether I get cancer, what is?
Perhaps it is because there seems to be no obvious answer to that question that it goes largely unasked. Cancer isn’t really a part of day-to-day life until you or someone you know gets it, at which point it becomes your life. Lucky for me, my mother caught it early and her treatment worked. Once she was given a clean bill of health, it was like closing the door behind the most unwelcome guest. The unfortunate truth about cancer, however, is that the unwanted guest never really goes away. No matter how distant the diagnosis, no matter how many years of health, the threat of relapse is there. The feeling of vulnerability that that threat engenders is perhaps what spurs so many people’s efforts to find a cure. And while I wholeheartedly applaud them, I wish we could shift our efforts (and money) from cure to prevention. I realize that it’s too late for prevention when someone you love gets cancer. All you can think about is a cure. But a cure is not going to keep the people you love from getting cancer in the first place. We have become so passively resigned to cancer’s insi-dious presence in our lives. Yet if we prevented it, we’d be eliminating the need for a cure.
Sound easy? Well, it’s easy enough to find things that cause cancer. It’s a little less easy to find it in your kids’ toothpaste. Yes, carcinogens are in toothpaste. There are carcinogens (not suspected, mind you, but known carcinogens) in soap, shampoo, mascara, sip-cups, detergent, sunscreen. One day, while dutifully slathering my kids with SPF30, I started reading the ingredients (a list of which has only been required in Canada since 2006) and found parabens, a chemical classified as an endocrine-disruptor, which essentially fakes your body into thinking it’s a hormone, thereby elevating risks of breast cancer and low sperm count. Not good! I looked up the sunscreen on www.ewg.org/skindeep, a website that details personal care products’ potential hazards to health. Finding out that I might be trading a fairly benign form of skin cancer for a future, much more lethal breast or testi-cular cancer was tough to swallow. It suddenly became far more important to read the labels. It’s a sobering exercise — one that led to a lot of changes in what I buy. I was so angry to find that I was unwittingly damaging my kids’ health and even angrier that the government was doing so little to protect consumers. If we know it is a carcinogen, then why am I allowed to buy it and, more importantly, why are manufacturers allowed to put it in their products?
Let’s face it, we’re not getting cancer, we’re buying it. It isn’t realistic to expect our health and bodies to remain resilient when they are under constant assault. As for prevention, why don’t we just start with taking cancer-causing chemicals out of products on the shelf and see what happens.
If you’re ready to stop buying it, have a look at:
www.leas.ca, www.ewg.org/skindeep
Sarah Cobb