"You're always hearing people blather on about how cancer made them a better person. Not me. I can't say that cancer has made me a better person, but I sure as hell can say it's made me an angry, bitter person. And, somewhat unexpectedly, it has also taught me how to pitch a blazing two-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. Or rather fast book. Specifically, those ubiquitous "inspirational" cancer books.
These two gifts from cancer, the bitterness and the pitching, are not unrelated. And raise your hand if you're shocked to hear: it's all about the money.
I admire what Mr. Armstrong has done and all, but how in the hell am I, a middle-aged bankrupt uninsured nobody, even remotely like this superhumanly fit young billionaire celebrity? As soon as he was diagnosed, Armstrong held a press conference announcing the bad news, and within hours dozens of the planet's leading oncologists were clambering aboard his bandwagon. Twenty-four hours later his crack team of brilliant cancer luminaries started his treatment.
My diagnosis at the underfunded overcrowded public charity Hospital for the Indigent Damned was delivered to me by a 12-year-old rotating resident whom I never saw before or since. And even though I have an extremely aggressive stage-IV cancer, it was another six weeks before my treatment began.
According to a new study being presented this week at the American Society of Hematology convention, "Patients from deprived areas had a higher relative risk to die compared to patients from affluent areas...The existing deprivation gap in relative survival for both men and women confirms that cancer survival depends on socio-economic background and is inequitable." Survival: it's all about the money. I bet fame doesn't hurt either.
Is this a fucked up inequitable world or what, when even an insured cancer patient's buddies are reduced to stripping and posing naked on a calendar so she can afford medical care? And then people try to blame it on the Prednisone when I can't stop crying."