Things that will give me cancer

Lately it seems like everything I do or use will somehow give me cancer. I feel like I’ve been bombarded lately with all these end-of-days warnings about everything from shampoo to the air I’m breathing. I just read some statistics from the American Cancer Society that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will get cancer at some point in their lives. This is mainly because we’re living long enough to get it and not crapping out in our childhood from diphtheria or from hypertension in our 40s. So that’s sort of good news. Sadly, cancer still strikes people who are far too young, and a lot of the time, we never really know why. A woman I admire very much recently was diagnosed with and is in treatment for a particularly nasty kind of cancer. To that point, she led a healthy lifestyle. She’s in her 50s. It was one of those make-you-think-about-your-own-mortality kind of things. She has done amazing things in her lifetime, and I think God has a lot more for her to do, so I’m pretty sure she’s going to beat this thing. 

But if someone like her could get this nasty cancer, it made me think about what could cause me to get it. I’ve covered the basic preventative stuff - never smoking, sunscreen, trying to get decent exercise, eating decently, etc., but based on all the doomsday articles I’ve read and heard, one of the things below probably is going to kill me. Well, we’ve all got to die from something …

I microwave food in plastic containers

I only do this at work, and it makes my life so much easier. I don’t have to waste one of the paper plates I keep in my office stash, so that’s good for the environment, right? It also helps re-moisten food if it’d dried out. But apparently it makes BPAs and parabens or something leech into my food. So while I’m enjoying enchiladas from two nights ago, little pieces of plastic are settling into my cells. The knowledge that this is happening has not been enough to change my behavior.

Similarly, I nuke ramen noodles in the styrofoam cup

I eat the ramen cup o’ noodles for lunch at absolute maximum once a month. But when I do, I fill that styrofoam cup with water and cook it right in the microwave, even though it expressly states not to on the package. Because I don’t know about your office, but mine doesn’t have a nice stove top with a quaint little tea kettle in which to boil water. Again, I’m going for convenience here. Convenience that will lead to DEATH!

I use shampoo

My shampoo’s main ingredient is sodium laureth sulfate. It’s probably the main ingredient in yours, too. It’s the main ingredient in like every cleanser. The chemical itself isn’t harmful (unless you leave shampoo on your scalp all day long or eat 15 pounds of toothpaste [I seriously read on snopes.com that’s the level needed for toxicity]), but some people think it gets contaminated with trace amounts of a carcinogenic chemical called 1,4 dioxane in the manufacturing process. So I’ll have clean hair when it falls out at my future chemotherapy treatments.

I got a couple of blistery sunburns as a kid

Those who know me now know that I am extremely cautious about the sun. In my early 20s I came to accept that I am pale and always will be. I started slathering on the SPF 50 and staying in the shade. I’m probably not getting enough Vitamin D now, but I take a multi-vitamin that has some and eat a lot of dairy. That’s got to help make up for it. I think about all these things now, but when you’re 12 years old and you get to go to a water park all day with friends, basal cell carcinoma isn’t really on your mind. I got a couple of the big, pus-filled blistering sunburns on my shoulders as a kid. I remember popping the blisters with safety pins I’d dipped in alcohol and sleeping shirtless because it I couldn’t bear for anything to touch my shoulders. I felt like a weird, tween, topless pervert and locked my bedroom door.  Also, as I noted in a previous post, sunscreen technology during my childhood wasn’t sufficient to protect someone of my skin color. Apparently that’s supposed to put me at a much higher risk for skin cancer. For someone who now wears sunscreen on her face every day, that seems really unfair. 

I didn’t breastfeed for very long

So breastfeeding is supposed to reduce your risk for breast cancer, and the longer you do it the better. Unfortunately, I sucked at it, and apparently my kid didn’t suck enough. I breastfed for just shy of two months. My kid wasn’t gaining enough weight, and I was miserable. If I’d gone for at least a year or more I think these boobs would be cancer-resistant orbs of mammary goodness. But as it stands, they’re just meh.

I talk on a cell phone

Like I actually hold it up to my face and talk on it occasionally, and that’s probably mutating my brain cells somehow. But it can’t be as bad as those self-important d-bags who keep a Bluetooth ear piece in all day long.

I work in an old building

During recent remodeling of my building, which was constructed in 1938, there were constantly plastic sheets hung up with warning of asbestos everywhere. The stuff is in the process of being abated, which I think translates to: “stirred up and kicked into the ventilation system.”

I breathe air

And in that air occasionally are diesel exhaust fumes, second-hand smoke, and whatever other air pollutants float around a city. But I live in Kansas City, not that gross smogville of Los Angeles, so I don’t think it’s that bad. Also, no one I hang out with smokes or drives a diesel-powered vehicle. Sometimes I smell sewer gas around manholes, but that’s just poopy, not carcinogenic.

And here’s a pretty comprehensive list by some British person of everything that has ever been potentially linked to cancer, to include such fun things as careers for women, olive oil, winter, pet birds, celery and left-handedness. It does the say the purpose of the site is the: “monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media.”

And here’s a real list from the American Cancer Society.

First-World Problems Vol. 2

CVS killing so many trees

I really do like the staff at my local CVS. They know my name, are very friendly and have never, ever gotten anything wrong (unlike a previous mail-order prescription service I used [cough - Express Scripts - cough] that screwed things up innumerable times in ways I didn’t even know it was possible to screw things up, like sending my birth control to a Fed-Ex depot an hour away from my house and demanding that I go pick it up there). So the customer service experience at my CVS is almost perfect except for two things involving extraneous paper: the crazy receipt lengths, and putting everything about me in 80 different places on every prescription info. packet. 

When I was über pregnant, I could wrap a CVS receipt around the circumference of my belly, and that’s saying something. Those things are like 8 feet long, all with coupons you will probably never, ever use. “$3 off your next $25 deodorant purchase.” No normal person purchases $25 worth of deodorant at one time. I’m certainly not the first one to be annoyed by this. Jimmy Kimmel did a funny piece on it the other night.

And whenever you get a prescription at CVS (maybe it’s the same with other pharmacies, I don’t know), they staple a thing to it that has your name, address, phone number and birthdate on it 80 times. So if some schmuck found it, they have just about everything needed to stalk me and/or steal my identity and/or let the whole world know I take generic Prevacid for chronic gastritis (ha! I just beat them at their own game and let you know that little tidbit first! Tomato sauce, citrus, vinegar and red wine make my insides go up in flames!). And some of it is in sticker form, so you can’t just stick it in the shredder without gumming it up. Rather than just pitch it in the recycling, you have to shred the non-sticky parts. I put the sticky parts either in with my child’s diapers or cat litter when I throw them out. So if you want to dig through my child’s or cats’ urine and feces to find out my birthday, then you probably deserve that information.

One non-tree related thing about my CVS: a few years ago, I was waiting to pick up a prescription when my husband came running up to me and whispered in my ear, “There are seriously turds on the floor over there.” I promptly went over, and sure enough, right there in the middle of aisle 11 was a pretty fresh-looking dump on the ground. I don’t know how that happens. I told the pharmacy tech when I picked up my prescription. She acted like I was speaking to her in Swahili. “No, seriously, there is poop on your floor right over there.” She still didn’t seem to believe me but said she’d have someone check on it. As we were walking out of the store, I heard someone yell, “Oh my God!”

Getting the good stuff out of a pomegranate is so hard

I think by nature of my midwest ethnicity, I am incapable of extracting arils from pomegranates. It’s like asking someone who has always lived in the jungle to do a great job skiing. Pomegranates are not a native fruit to the Kansas City area, but every winter they pop up in grocery stores for $2.50 each, shipped in from California or other climes more suited to growing tropical fruit. And the stuff inside them is AMAZING, but it is so much darn hard work to get to it. 

The first time I had a pomegranate was just a few years ago. They didn’t make it to the grocery store in the small town outside of Kansas City where I grew up, or maybe they just didn’t sell them at Aldi - my mother’s preferred place for obtaining food in my childhood. I lost my pomegranate virginity by trying to dig the arils out with a spoon, and then with my fingers. It took like half an hour. I decided no fruit was worth that much work. But then I started seeing them in the store in subsequent years, and the cravings hit. I bought little pre-packaged containers of just the arils, but they cost a ton of money for not very much pommy goodness. So I decided to get the whole fruit again.

I’d just watched a thing on TV about cutting the pomegranate in half and then spanking it with a wooden spoon to knock all the arils out. Then I saw an online video about it, which said it was way easier and more effective than the method of putting it in water, which several of my friends recommended. So I tried it tonight, and it was a rather messy undertaking. Because when you’re smacking the bejeezus out of a pomegranate, the arils don’t fall straight down into the bowl like they did on TV. They shot everywhere - into walls, all over the floor, the cat food dish, etc. Maybe I need more practice. It took about 10 minutes to get everything out and clean up all the ones that had shot everywhere and left lit bits of sticky in their wake. But Lord, it was so delicious, and there was enough in that one pomegranate to last several more days. It tasted better than the pre-packaged arils, too. Maybe next time, I’ll just put up a little tent around myself when I spank a pomegranate. 

I need more of the good cold medicines

I live in the state that historically has been the meth capitol of the U.S.  As a non-druggy, one would think this wouldn’t be an issue for me. But it is. It’s one of those a-few-people-are-stupid-so-let’s-punish-everyone deals. The problem is one of the key ingredients in a drug that makes you literally scratch your face off and blow up your trailer also is the most amazing freaking cold medicine there is: Sudafed. It will dry the snot up out of your face and let you live a semi-ordinary life while afflicted with a rhinovirus. It will keep your ears from getting all clogged up and drainage from running down the back of your throat and making it sore. And there are versions that last for 12 hours at a time. It is a miracle. But unfortunately, if you mix it with fertilizer, rat poison and nail polish remover - which I believe is close to the perfect meth recipe - it also becomes the white trash drug of choice.

So the state decided to regulate the crap out of Sudafed. You can only get it behind the counter now, and you have to show your ID and sign for it. And you can only buy a little bit at a time. But I need it for day and night! I need the 12-hour stuff some days and the 6-hour stuff other days! I need to stock up because this snotfest may last forever! Thanks, toothless addicts, for ruining a good thing for the congested millions. 

Someone else messing up my driver’s seat

In a very first-world issue, I have my own car, and the driver seat is set to my physical specifications. My height. My weight. My lines of sight. If my husband ever drives it, everything is all messed up. He is 7 inches taller than me. You wouldn’t believe how many adjustments that takes. Similarly, he just got his car back from getting it repaired. All Goldilocks-style, he stomped in the house whining, “Someone else has been sitting in my seat. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it right again.” He wants one of those cars where it memorizes your settings. 

Meanwhile, some kid in the slums of India would really like some clean drinking water.