Saturday, August 20, 2005

Another One Bites The Dust...

I attended my second funeral of the year yesterday. Not bad going considering my attendance rates at funeral's last year!

A family we have known for a good few years lost their leader yesterday when Husband and Dad Geo died just 10 weeks after finding out he had cancer.

He was a nice man and it is really sad that he had to end his life suffering the way he did. It also a damn shame that his family had to watch him waste away like that in pain. No-one deserves to be put through that. We wouldn't let it happen to a dog, yet law dictates that we should allow ourselves and our loved one's to suffer even when all hope is lost. That can't right.

Cancer is a horrible illness that will affect one in three of the British population at some time in their lives. It is an indiscriminate illness which picks it's victims at random. Geo had very little in the way of symptoms that he was carrying this plague in him. They say that there are things we can do to lessen our chances of having cancer. Eat healthily, stop smoking and drinking and lead an active life. Tell that to the family of my Brother in Law. Bridget, his Mother, is now dead as a result of Cancer. She never smoked in her life, very rarely drunk if at all, kept her weight at a healthy level and had an active life.

Yesterday they told women that if we eat chips just once a week or risk of getting breast cancer rises by 27%. My personal response? Bullshit.

They would be better off trying to find the cure for this disease than wasting millions telling us not to eat chips once a week. I still cannot believe that we can send man to the moon, make cloned babies, catch mass murderers through a cigarette end left at a crime scene but we still cannot find a really effective answer to cancer.

Sadly until we do many more families will have to go through the same pain watching their relatives try and fight this horrible disease. I pray (selfishly) that one of these families is not mine and I pray that it is not yours either.

R.I.P Geo.

Jenny xx

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