Palmolive? You're soaking in it!
Ok, Paw-Paw's fixin' to preach...
Since hearing the dreaded scarlet C word come out of a doctor's mouth, directed towards me, I have been having a lot of "Why me? Why now?" moments. I suppose it's to be expected when one is only in their earliest of early forties you really don't expect to have a doctor say "C word" to you. Even when it's highly curable and such, as mine was, it's still scary as hell.
The doctors hasten to tell me that I'm "young for this kind of thing." I've heard that over and over again. Of course on the heels of this admission I have now heard no fewer than three of my doctors say "But it's becoming more and more common in your age group."
I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject and there's a variety of stances about the prevalence of the big C in my age group. One stance is that we're not having more, we're just -finding- more because our methods of detection are so much better than they once were and so on. I suppose there's some truth to that, but it wasn't any sort of advanced detection that was used in my case. It was "Oh. A lump. What's that about?"
Depending upon whom you read, what they're trying to sell, what side of the ideological fence they're on and so on, the results can be anything from "We're not having this happen more...don't be hysterical." to "OMG! Rocks fall. Everybody dies."
It seems to me, untrained in the medical arts type person that I am, that we are, in fact, having more incidences of the big C showing up in younger and younger folks. I have been stepping widely around a book that's been referred to me three or ten times, it's called "The Emperor of Maladies" and it was written as a kind of history of cancer. I'm not at a place where I can read that yet, but there's apparently a part of this book that talks about how Egyptian mummies show no signs of cancer whatsoever. None. Zip and Zero. There's speculation that the industrial revolution may be to blame for the Big C showing up at all, and then there's a thousand different tributary routes through the fact that my generation and maybe the one immediately prior to mine were the first generation of "Chemical kids."
When I was little, in the early seventies, everything I touched was plastic, neon colored and chemically laden. Weebles. Molded plastic chairs. Hard plastic Tonka trucks and blocks. My childhood was suffused with that sweet "long chain polymers" smell of Christmas morning packages being opened. We melted plastic cups and beads in a baking oven to make Christmas ornaments for our parents in my second grade class. We drank Kool Aide and ate M&M's with red ones in them, later pulled because red dye #40 was found to be carcinogenic. We didn't know yet that lead paint was a big problem. Kids living up the street from the smelting plant in nearby El Paso just got dumber and dumber and nobody knew why. My Dad put some god-awful compilation of chemicals from DOW on his lawn every few days during the spring. We thought it was funny to lie on our backs near my Grandpa's house in rural Missouri and watch the crop dusting planes pass overhead.
I could go on and on, but you know, the 80's didn't get any better (I can't be the only one who sat in Driver's Ed with my eyes burning from the combination of Aqua Net, Liz Claiborne, Polo, Ex-cla-Mation!, LA Looks and eyeliner pencils being roasted on an open fire).
In the 90's I remember hearing the first stirrings and rumblings about the chemical stew we were all soaking in. In the early 2000's I first started to hear about people suffering from "MCS...multiple chemical sensitivities." They were on the news, shown in their dingy Amish houses, looking for all the world like that kid in the bubble we all saw in the 70's - all because their bodies were freaking out about things the rest of us took for granted - the stew. I remember thinking "Oh wow, that's so sad.." and having a twinge of unease about how many things that would mean you'd have to do without.
There are a lot of chemicals about.
Fast forward to the now and I'm reading up on various cancers and thanks to the mixed blessing that is the internet, I'm reading report after report about how this chemical and that chemical causes verifiable changes in lab rats. I'm reading about how the corporations that own the patents to those chemicals are trying to stop or sabotage clinical tests talking about the effects their products may have on humans. I'm reading and watching documentaries about how the FDA is a toothless old bulldog that nobody even pretends could bite anymore to protect anybody from anything. I'm learning about how Europe's version of the FDA bans several hundred chemicals commonly found in household products as being hazardous to humans, but in the good old USA we have banned a grand total of FOUR. I'm looking at how our food is processed and handled badly.
Legal battles where the guy with the most money wins, regardless of the merits of their case. Multiple cases where industry thugs intimidate, bully or buy their way out of having to care about what their products do. Multiple cases of how the corporate spin machines begin to bend, fold and mutilate the truth in the few instances where it does actually come to people's attention.
Would Thalidomide still be on the market if it came out today? It's a really good question.
I was starting this information seeking journey in a mindset where I was curious and a little anxious. I have grown to be wildly alarmed the more I find out.
The thing that's alarmed me the most is the inescapable nature of what's happening. Our food systems are completely abrogated. I decide I'm going to eat only organic foods but then I find out that the term "organic" is rapidly being co-opted to meaninglessness just as the term "natural" has been. Corporate interests finding ways to make that end run around giving the consumers what we need to make advised decisions about our environments, about something as intimate as the food we put in our bodies.
I'm still trying though.
I'm doing best I can in an environment that is designed to make the path of least resistance one which is a chemically infused nightmare zone. I culled the obvious first offenders - orange cheez, bright red drink mixes, diet sodas. I'd already removed the plethora of processed foods which I grew up with (Stove Top, Rice A Roni, Fruit Loops, Doritos, Stouffers, Cool Whip...the list goes on for miles) years ago, so at least I don't have -that- far to come. I move my marker a little further down the road by going with organic as much as I can, by reading Pollan's books and going with whole foods or packaged foods that only have obviously recognizable ingredients. I think "Ok, that should do it, right?"
Only, no. It doesn't even scratch the surface.
I turn around and I realize that the chemical soup goes further than my food. How is my food being stored? The cans are lined with plastic? The tupperware has off-gassing issues? Plastic + Microwave = Toxic compounds in my food? What am I using to clean my dishes? What's in Palmolive anyway? What am I using on the linens I sleep on? Here's a spray that we use in the bathroom to mask the stinky. Here's shampoo that contains...what IS that even? Deodorant. Hair gel. Carpet deodorizer. Scented candles. Body wash. Floor cleaners. Toilet bowl tablets that turn the water blue. Scrubbing bubbles. Foaming washes. Zit creams. Aftershave. Shaving cream. What's in my antibiotic cream? What's in Tylenol? Sudafed? Benadryl?
I go outside for some fresh air and I can smell charcoal starter from the neighbor's grill....it's got a distinctive petro-chemical stink to it...what's in THAT?
I went into Ace Hardware yesterday to get a pair of hedge trimmers and the instant I walked through the door the myriad of chemical stinks that hit me in the face made me want to hold my shirt over my face the entire time I was in there - and you couldn't get me out of there fast enough.
Fertilizers, bug killers, rat poisons, paints, solvents, adhesives, plastics, vinyls, Rubbermade...
I can't even have Calgon take me away, because Calgon? WHAT'S IN THAT???
You cannot escape. We are living in Big Chemical's oompa loompa factory.
Every few days another product in my world goes on the "Nevermore" heap. Every few days the products I can feel good about buying from the local supermarket drops. I'm down to about two aisles now and even those two aisles I'm careful about. Did you know that most lunchmeats have sodium nitrite in them? I didn't. I thought as long as I stayed clear of ham and bacon, I'd be in the clear. Nope. Turkey, chicken, hot dogs....it's in there too. It gives you stomach cancer and the relationship is pretty cut and dried from everything I've read, but it's still there...in every Lunchable.
What do you do about something like that? What can you do? What can any of us do? It can make you go mental to even -notice- this is going on. The opt-out options for so many are so very limited. I am fortunate enough that I can look at organic salad greens that cost $2 more and decide "Yes, that's worth it." For other people? That's a deal breaker on their budget.
As Soren is fond of saying "The non-poisoned food costs more."
I'm trying to figure out where I can cut back on the level of chemicals I expose myself to. All I can do, I figure, is cut my exposure thresholds as much as I can, wherever I can. I still have to live in this world as it is, where every time I turn around someone is spraying chemicals in the air at me without my consent.
I was in the hospital bathroom recently and I heard this "Pfftt!" noise from above me as I washed my hands. I looked up and there was this air freshener dispenser overhead, just giving a little puff of God Knows What every so often which I had no choice but to inhale into my nice, pink, gas permiable membranes. At a hospital. Where they KNOW how gas permiable our lungs are.
I know that most of you are smart people who are aware of all of this stuff going on. I'm sure this isn't news to most of you. I was a smart guy who knew it was going on too, and I was already trying to make changes.
I think what's gotten to me in the post-big-C headspace I'm currently in is the scale. I didn't comprehend the scale of it, the magnitude of the chemical bath we're all soaking in. The "death by a million papercuts" nature of it all. Hey, I just printed a page out...what the hell is printer ink made of?
The words of my old art instructor hang in my memory, haunting me: "If you can smell it, it's IN you."
Truly, it's enough to drive you to an isolation tank or a crusty commune in Sonoma.
I've thought for several days about what and whether I should post anything about this on my LJ. I don't like posting negativity and this certainly qualifies as negative. I don't like preaching like some newly converted Bible Thumper either.
The reason I decided to go ahead and post this is this: IF you're reading this then however peripherally we may be encountering one another, I care about you. I care about all something-something hundred of you who're on my LJ F-list. My F-list is made up of some of the dearest people in my world. You are my friends, my family, my co-conspirators and fellow travellers. I don't want anything to hurt you, and everything I'm finding out leads me to believe that you -are- being hurt. We all are.
I'm not asking any of you to go all Full Amish on me. Hell, I'm not even doing that and I'm in Hugely Overreactionary Headspace right now....but I am asking you to start to think for a little bit about which chemical cocktails you can live without in your life.
I'm asking you to turn products over and start reading ingredients and think about what you're putting in your bodies. I'm asking you to take just a second to go "Does anyone really NEED Febreeze?"
And in those areas where you can, choose to avoid the chemical cocktails. Or choose the more natural product. The more healthy-for-humans products.
I don't want anybody else to have to sit in a room and have a doctor say the big C word to them. It's happened to too many of you already. It's a hugely awful, scary, terrible experience and I don't wish it on anyone. I want it to stop. I want things to reverse course and for corporations to start to s-u-s-p-e-c-t something as more and more of us show every indication of being On To Them.
If by posting this I even have the chance that I can say something that gets some of you people whom I care about to choose one less chemical agent to have in your life, well I'm gonna say it. Maybe that won't have done anything major - but you never know. Maybe that is the very chemical that would've interacted with the other chemical which would've changed some tiny bit of your DNA in such a way that one cell with delusions of grandeur could go on a wild bender and f everything up...
Go therefore, and be as healthy as you can, my droogies. And hey, if the revolution time comes where we can lay the smackdown on some of these corporations? Let's do what we can, shall we? Because we have turned the bend into Cray-Cray land and we need to find the way back before we're all lookin' like this:
The Toxic Avenger
Since hearing the dreaded scarlet C word come out of a doctor's mouth, directed towards me, I have been having a lot of "Why me? Why now?" moments. I suppose it's to be expected when one is only in their earliest of early forties you really don't expect to have a doctor say "C word" to you. Even when it's highly curable and such, as mine was, it's still scary as hell.
The doctors hasten to tell me that I'm "young for this kind of thing." I've heard that over and over again. Of course on the heels of this admission I have now heard no fewer than three of my doctors say "But it's becoming more and more common in your age group."
I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject and there's a variety of stances about the prevalence of the big C in my age group. One stance is that we're not having more, we're just -finding- more because our methods of detection are so much better than they once were and so on. I suppose there's some truth to that, but it wasn't any sort of advanced detection that was used in my case. It was "Oh. A lump. What's that about?"
Depending upon whom you read, what they're trying to sell, what side of the ideological fence they're on and so on, the results can be anything from "We're not having this happen more...don't be hysterical." to "OMG! Rocks fall. Everybody dies."
It seems to me, untrained in the medical arts type person that I am, that we are, in fact, having more incidences of the big C showing up in younger and younger folks. I have been stepping widely around a book that's been referred to me three or ten times, it's called "The Emperor of Maladies" and it was written as a kind of history of cancer. I'm not at a place where I can read that yet, but there's apparently a part of this book that talks about how Egyptian mummies show no signs of cancer whatsoever. None. Zip and Zero. There's speculation that the industrial revolution may be to blame for the Big C showing up at all, and then there's a thousand different tributary routes through the fact that my generation and maybe the one immediately prior to mine were the first generation of "Chemical kids."
When I was little, in the early seventies, everything I touched was plastic, neon colored and chemically laden. Weebles. Molded plastic chairs. Hard plastic Tonka trucks and blocks. My childhood was suffused with that sweet "long chain polymers" smell of Christmas morning packages being opened. We melted plastic cups and beads in a baking oven to make Christmas ornaments for our parents in my second grade class. We drank Kool Aide and ate M&M's with red ones in them, later pulled because red dye #40 was found to be carcinogenic. We didn't know yet that lead paint was a big problem. Kids living up the street from the smelting plant in nearby El Paso just got dumber and dumber and nobody knew why. My Dad put some god-awful compilation of chemicals from DOW on his lawn every few days during the spring. We thought it was funny to lie on our backs near my Grandpa's house in rural Missouri and watch the crop dusting planes pass overhead.
I could go on and on, but you know, the 80's didn't get any better (I can't be the only one who sat in Driver's Ed with my eyes burning from the combination of Aqua Net, Liz Claiborne, Polo, Ex-cla-Mation!, LA Looks and eyeliner pencils being roasted on an open fire).
In the 90's I remember hearing the first stirrings and rumblings about the chemical stew we were all soaking in. In the early 2000's I first started to hear about people suffering from "MCS...multiple chemical sensitivities." They were on the news, shown in their dingy Amish houses, looking for all the world like that kid in the bubble we all saw in the 70's - all because their bodies were freaking out about things the rest of us took for granted - the stew. I remember thinking "Oh wow, that's so sad.." and having a twinge of unease about how many things that would mean you'd have to do without.
There are a lot of chemicals about.
Fast forward to the now and I'm reading up on various cancers and thanks to the mixed blessing that is the internet, I'm reading report after report about how this chemical and that chemical causes verifiable changes in lab rats. I'm reading about how the corporations that own the patents to those chemicals are trying to stop or sabotage clinical tests talking about the effects their products may have on humans. I'm reading and watching documentaries about how the FDA is a toothless old bulldog that nobody even pretends could bite anymore to protect anybody from anything. I'm learning about how Europe's version of the FDA bans several hundred chemicals commonly found in household products as being hazardous to humans, but in the good old USA we have banned a grand total of FOUR. I'm looking at how our food is processed and handled badly.
Legal battles where the guy with the most money wins, regardless of the merits of their case. Multiple cases where industry thugs intimidate, bully or buy their way out of having to care about what their products do. Multiple cases of how the corporate spin machines begin to bend, fold and mutilate the truth in the few instances where it does actually come to people's attention.
Would Thalidomide still be on the market if it came out today? It's a really good question.
I was starting this information seeking journey in a mindset where I was curious and a little anxious. I have grown to be wildly alarmed the more I find out.
The thing that's alarmed me the most is the inescapable nature of what's happening. Our food systems are completely abrogated. I decide I'm going to eat only organic foods but then I find out that the term "organic" is rapidly being co-opted to meaninglessness just as the term "natural" has been. Corporate interests finding ways to make that end run around giving the consumers what we need to make advised decisions about our environments, about something as intimate as the food we put in our bodies.
I'm still trying though.
I'm doing best I can in an environment that is designed to make the path of least resistance one which is a chemically infused nightmare zone. I culled the obvious first offenders - orange cheez, bright red drink mixes, diet sodas. I'd already removed the plethora of processed foods which I grew up with (Stove Top, Rice A Roni, Fruit Loops, Doritos, Stouffers, Cool Whip...the list goes on for miles) years ago, so at least I don't have -that- far to come. I move my marker a little further down the road by going with organic as much as I can, by reading Pollan's books and going with whole foods or packaged foods that only have obviously recognizable ingredients. I think "Ok, that should do it, right?"
Only, no. It doesn't even scratch the surface.
I turn around and I realize that the chemical soup goes further than my food. How is my food being stored? The cans are lined with plastic? The tupperware has off-gassing issues? Plastic + Microwave = Toxic compounds in my food? What am I using to clean my dishes? What's in Palmolive anyway? What am I using on the linens I sleep on? Here's a spray that we use in the bathroom to mask the stinky. Here's shampoo that contains...what IS that even? Deodorant. Hair gel. Carpet deodorizer. Scented candles. Body wash. Floor cleaners. Toilet bowl tablets that turn the water blue. Scrubbing bubbles. Foaming washes. Zit creams. Aftershave. Shaving cream. What's in my antibiotic cream? What's in Tylenol? Sudafed? Benadryl?
I go outside for some fresh air and I can smell charcoal starter from the neighbor's grill....it's got a distinctive petro-chemical stink to it...what's in THAT?
I went into Ace Hardware yesterday to get a pair of hedge trimmers and the instant I walked through the door the myriad of chemical stinks that hit me in the face made me want to hold my shirt over my face the entire time I was in there - and you couldn't get me out of there fast enough.
Fertilizers, bug killers, rat poisons, paints, solvents, adhesives, plastics, vinyls, Rubbermade...
I can't even have Calgon take me away, because Calgon? WHAT'S IN THAT???
You cannot escape. We are living in Big Chemical's oompa loompa factory.
Every few days another product in my world goes on the "Nevermore" heap. Every few days the products I can feel good about buying from the local supermarket drops. I'm down to about two aisles now and even those two aisles I'm careful about. Did you know that most lunchmeats have sodium nitrite in them? I didn't. I thought as long as I stayed clear of ham and bacon, I'd be in the clear. Nope. Turkey, chicken, hot dogs....it's in there too. It gives you stomach cancer and the relationship is pretty cut and dried from everything I've read, but it's still there...in every Lunchable.
What do you do about something like that? What can you do? What can any of us do? It can make you go mental to even -notice- this is going on. The opt-out options for so many are so very limited. I am fortunate enough that I can look at organic salad greens that cost $2 more and decide "Yes, that's worth it." For other people? That's a deal breaker on their budget.
As Soren is fond of saying "The non-poisoned food costs more."
I'm trying to figure out where I can cut back on the level of chemicals I expose myself to. All I can do, I figure, is cut my exposure thresholds as much as I can, wherever I can. I still have to live in this world as it is, where every time I turn around someone is spraying chemicals in the air at me without my consent.
I was in the hospital bathroom recently and I heard this "Pfftt!" noise from above me as I washed my hands. I looked up and there was this air freshener dispenser overhead, just giving a little puff of God Knows What every so often which I had no choice but to inhale into my nice, pink, gas permiable membranes. At a hospital. Where they KNOW how gas permiable our lungs are.
I know that most of you are smart people who are aware of all of this stuff going on. I'm sure this isn't news to most of you. I was a smart guy who knew it was going on too, and I was already trying to make changes.
I think what's gotten to me in the post-big-C headspace I'm currently in is the scale. I didn't comprehend the scale of it, the magnitude of the chemical bath we're all soaking in. The "death by a million papercuts" nature of it all. Hey, I just printed a page out...what the hell is printer ink made of?
The words of my old art instructor hang in my memory, haunting me: "If you can smell it, it's IN you."
Truly, it's enough to drive you to an isolation tank or a crusty commune in Sonoma.
I've thought for several days about what and whether I should post anything about this on my LJ. I don't like posting negativity and this certainly qualifies as negative. I don't like preaching like some newly converted Bible Thumper either.
The reason I decided to go ahead and post this is this: IF you're reading this then however peripherally we may be encountering one another, I care about you. I care about all something-something hundred of you who're on my LJ F-list. My F-list is made up of some of the dearest people in my world. You are my friends, my family, my co-conspirators and fellow travellers. I don't want anything to hurt you, and everything I'm finding out leads me to believe that you -are- being hurt. We all are.
I'm not asking any of you to go all Full Amish on me. Hell, I'm not even doing that and I'm in Hugely Overreactionary Headspace right now....but I am asking you to start to think for a little bit about which chemical cocktails you can live without in your life.
I'm asking you to turn products over and start reading ingredients and think about what you're putting in your bodies. I'm asking you to take just a second to go "Does anyone really NEED Febreeze?"
And in those areas where you can, choose to avoid the chemical cocktails. Or choose the more natural product. The more healthy-for-humans products.
I don't want anybody else to have to sit in a room and have a doctor say the big C word to them. It's happened to too many of you already. It's a hugely awful, scary, terrible experience and I don't wish it on anyone. I want it to stop. I want things to reverse course and for corporations to start to s-u-s-p-e-c-t something as more and more of us show every indication of being On To Them.
If by posting this I even have the chance that I can say something that gets some of you people whom I care about to choose one less chemical agent to have in your life, well I'm gonna say it. Maybe that won't have done anything major - but you never know. Maybe that is the very chemical that would've interacted with the other chemical which would've changed some tiny bit of your DNA in such a way that one cell with delusions of grandeur could go on a wild bender and f everything up...
Go therefore, and be as healthy as you can, my droogies. And hey, if the revolution time comes where we can lay the smackdown on some of these corporations? Let's do what we can, shall we? Because we have turned the bend into Cray-Cray land and we need to find the way back before we're all lookin' like this:
The Toxic Avenger