In Memory of My Grandmother, Joan Baggott

Cancer is bad. Cancer is probably one of the worst ways to die, in my opinion. In one of my previous classes, I learned that women are most afraid of dying of cancer.. The only problem lies that they are most afraid of breast cancer. Because of this immense fear, a lot of research is put into this field, as well as a lot of the NIH's cancer funding.

My grandmother died from a horrible, long painful death. She had stomach cancer, one of the rarest cancers in the United States. Most cases of stomach cancer are in Asian countries (China, Japan, etc.) so it is pretty rare here. It is caused by a bacteria in undercooked food, mostly. The unfortunate part about this cancer is that most people do not get tested until the cancer has progressed incredibly far. This was the case with my grandmother.

In August, she had surgery to remove a mass in her stomach. Before the surgery, she was declared to have stage two stomach cancer. When she went in for surgery, they found that it was actually stage four cancer and had to remove a large portion of her stomach and hundred of lymph nodes surrounding the stomach. Because of the surgery, she was never able to eat much and vomited the majority of the food she tried to eat. She went through many months of rigorous chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer continued to spread rapidly through her body and eventually spread to her bones. The past month has been horrible for her and my family. A little over two weeks ago, she was sent to a hospice house and died on May 14th, 2009, surrounded by her family. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, she weighed 180 pounds; when she died, she was under 100 pounds and looked like nothing but a skeleton.

This being said, why are we putting so much money towards breast cancer research? Shouldn't we be putting money into these cancers that are found normally in the late stages? Breast cancer can easily be found, through frequent self breast exams. If we are to put more funding into breast cancer research, we should be putting more money into heat-sensitive "mammograms". Heat-sensitive technology is MUCH more reliable than mammograms, since mammograms only became popular due to the high cost of the machinery. In any other country, women are not recommended to get mammograms every year until much later in life. Studies have shown that mammograms aren't more reliable than self breast exams or exams done by palpating the breast. So, why are we putting so much awareness on breast cancer? We should be putting more money into these organs that are less easy to discover cancer on!

Now, before I post this, I want to make sure that anyone that reads this understands that I do feel sympathy for people who have had breast cancer, for those who have died from breast cancer, and those that are fighting breast cancer currently. I have numerous Susan G. Komen items around my condo and certainly think that breast cancer is a bad thing too. However.. there are other cancers that we should be concerned about. As a matter of fact, the number one killer of women isn't even a cancer; it's heart disease! Cancer is something that has hit my family and I very hard. My father fought and won against kidney cancer in 2008 - we were incredibly lucky that his cancer was contained in his kidney so all he had to do was have his kidney removed. I have had teachers and classmates before that have fought and won against other cancers. One of my aunts and I have also dealt with a cancer of our own. I certainly have sympathy for people who have had cancer and I can totally empathise what they go through.

All that I ask is that everyone question what they hear from the healthcare field and that they not latch on to fads about health. Look up the information on the research that you monetarily support and get the word out that we need to research these other cancers too. Cancer is a very large issue and I hope that during my lifetime, we find a cure for cancer entirely.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope that you've learned something from what I've said.

Kaitlyn Timmerman
In Memory of Joan Baggott, 5/14/09