Miss Cathy
A few weeks ago, I asked for urgent assistance with regard to a couple of cancer treatments, as part of frustratingly unfruitful efforts to help an unnamed friend get the care she needs. If you read her blog, and if you read her entry for yesterday in particular, you may have guessed that the friend in question is Cathy Seipp.
If you know Cathy outside of the blogosphere - that is, in ‘real life’ - you may already know about this. If you don’t, you may find it very hard to believe, considering how physically fit and generally glowing she is. (Check out this picture of Cathy and me at Boardner’s in Hollywood earlier this year. What I can’t get over is how much chunkier I was then and how horrible my eyebrows were. Cathy? Looks fantastic, as always.) She could have easily kept this a secret, but TV producer Rob Long convinced her otherwise.
Rob Long suggested to me a couple of weeks ago something that’s been on my mind anyway. He thinks it’s time for me to start writing about my health situation on this blog, and has even promised to venture into the comments if I do: “Easy for me to say, I know,” he added. “But I just had to say it. Cancer can do many things, but it can’t take away talent. Life hands you lemons, make lemonade; life hands you cancer, make cancerade.”
Cathy was first diagnosed more than three years ago with lung cancer. She has never smoked even one cigarette, never lived or worked with smokers, and in fact [has] zero family history and no other risk factors at all (unusual even in people who don’t get cancer). So why is she blogging about it now?
For one thing, I’m beginning to feel a responsibility to point out that lung cancer, which kills more people annually (about 163,000) than the next four most common cancers (colon, breast, pancreatic and prostate) combined, is terribly underfunded compared to other diseases: $950 in research money per lung cancer death, compared to $8800 for breast cancer and $34,000 for AIDS.
That’s because the vast majority of lung cancer (about 85%) is still caused by smoking, even though the rate for lifelong nonsmoking women like me (and Christopher Reeve’s widow) has been going up for some mysterious reason, and the general attitude is that smokers deserve whatever they get.
But half of all lung cancer patients have been nonsmokers by the time of diagnosis, sometimes for decades, like Warren Zevon. If they deserve to get sick, then I suppose so do people who are overweight or don’t exercise or who have promiscuous sex with strangers, all of which are contributing factors for various illnesses that get much more sympathy in the form of research dollars. Maybe the amount of attention we pay to a disease should have less to do with how many celebrities and magazine editors and junk bond kings carry its banner, and more with how many people actually die of it.
Filed under: Life