It isn’t what it looks like? Really?
That’s What He Said
Best post ever.
A physician talks about the pre-abortion sonogram law. ”It’s time for a little old fashioned civil disobedience,” he says.
Thank you.
You mean it was growing in my garden the whole time?
A friend of mine has a bad case of uterine fibroids and is about to have surgery to fix it. She’s understandably scared, of the surgery itself, of any complications with her possible future fertility, and because the doctors have thrown around the word malignancy, she’s freaking out just a wee little bit. In order to give her a morale boost, our mutual friend Moxie of Ask Moxie fame asked her readers to tell their stories about fibroids and fertility. So far so good: Moxie’s readers never fail to deliver — except for one woman who posted about raw food, herbs, and yadda bullshit yadda. And then, while researching plants for my garden I stumbled upon a link to a web site promising herbal cures for cancer. Oh my! If only I had known! Wormwood! I could have harvested some plants of uncertain potency but poisonous certainty, brewed them in unmeasured quantity, and drunk them — during the dark of the moon, perhaps — and cured my cancer that way. It feels like a sock in the gut.
Healthy food is healthy. Herbs are good — I have a huge herb garden, and that’s why I was googling plant names. Furthermore, research never hurt any one — so what’s the problem? I am reminded of the six stages of learning according to Ibn al-Qayyim:
Firstly: Asking questions in a good manner.
Secondly: Remaining quiet and listening attentively.
Thirdly: Understanding well.
Fourthly: Memorising.
Fifthly: Teaching.
Sixthly – and it is its fruit: Acting upon the knowledge and keeping to its limits.
Call it bad science. Call it an epistemological fallacy. The persistent myth that modern medicine is wrong, that we should address our ills with commonly found garden plants fails on all six counts, and most importantly, the sixth: acting upon the knowledge and most especially keeping to its limits.
There is nothing wrong, per se, with an herbal tincture. What’s wrong is letting superstition stand in the way of science, and preying on gullible people who fear what they do not understand. Spreading the lie garden plants or, worse, proprietary and expensive herbal blends, will cure cancer jeopardizes people who don’t even know the right questions to ask but who will blindly trust someone who tells them what they want them to hear. It insults the tens of thousands of women and men who have devoted their lives to the study of disease and the quest for a cure. It insults the millions of women and men, including me, who have undergone treatment pushing us to the very brink of death so that we might have a chance at life. And most of all, it’s an abhomination of an an insult to the men and women, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who have lost their lives to cancer, implying that had they only but opened their minds they might have lived.
I know that people truly believe in the magic power of herbs — and I also acknowledge that plants play a key role in many forms of legitimate religious practice. I know that my lone voice will never change anyone’s mind. And I also know, because my doctors told me so, that a certain number of cancer cases, about 10% according to my doctor, do resolve themselves without any medical intervention.
But conflating the power of herbs with a magic cure for cancer takes us back to the dark ages when a cancer diagnosis was a death warrant.
It’s Not About Me
Chris and I spent today working in the garden. It’s time to plant stuff, here in Texas. As the shadows grew long, we sat on the front porch and drank beer. Then he said, ”How come you care?”
“Huh?”
“How come you care so much?”
“Huh?”
“You’re married. We can afford more kids. You can’t possibly get pregnant — you don’t have any more ovaries. How come you care so much about birth control and abortion rights?”
“Three out of the five guys from my friends list who re-posted my rant on birth control and abortion rights are gay. It’s not about ‘what might happen to me.’ It’s about the fact that when the rights of half the population disappear, everyone suffers. It’s like there’s this huge movement to move us back to the bad old days like things were in the fifties.”
“Everyone says the fifties were great. Even your mom says the fifties were great.”
“My mom says the fifties were great because she was as rich as Croesus, but when you press her, she also says they sucked for everyone who wasn’t a white guy. The feminist movement came out of the fifties. The civil rights movement came out of the fifties. No one wants to go back to the fifties.”
Chris drank a long pull off his beer.
“So, I’m a white guy. Why shouldn’t I want things to go backwards?”
“So our daughter can get raped and then have her entire sexual history put on trial? So that if our son turns out to be gay, he’ll have to live in the closet? So that neither of our kids can ever date — or marry — someone from another race or culture? Like you did? So that we all think it’s okay to round up an entire nationality and imprison them for years?” At this point I was starting to get all hot under the collar, but Chris was grinning at me.
“Well, I’m a white guy. Things for me would be pretty great, wouldn’t they? So why should I care?”
“So what you’re saying is that the people who talk so much about returning to the social values of an earlier era are pretty much assholes?”
“Pretty much. Now, woman, I spent all day working in the garden for you. Go make me a sammich.”
“Make your own damn sammich. I’ll bring you another beer, though.”
“Make sure you take your shoes off when you’re in the kitchen.”
That’s how it is, huh.”
“Damn straight.”
“Sexksay.”
Then Chris finished his beer and went to build Legos with our kids.
Thanks, everyone, for the huge response to the post I wrote earlier.
No, really, it’s bad
Well, no, it’s not, but it’s not good, either.
Housekeeping is not a strong point with me. Instead of being the superwoman I am in my imagination, I spend hours standing in my slightly messy house wondering what to do next. What to do first. Where to begin. I’m at a stage where everything is functional, but there are small piles of clutter scattered about the house. I know to conquer them one pile at a time, but I’m overwhelmed — or else underwhelmed, because there are always things I would rather do, like cook, or write, or go for a walk, or take a nap.
I just went and took a picture of a pile of toys upstairs that’s been there for a few days (weeks). Chris said, “So you do see the mess.” I do, but I don’t know where to begin to deal with it. So I’m doing what I know to do, and that is to write about it.
It’s a start.
Damp
“I don’t want to plant plants in the rain,” Chris said this morning. I couldn’t hear the raindrops plonking on the patio outside our bedroom, but he could. Chris has what they call hyperacute hearing. Our back deck is full of plants in pots, as well as a couple of bare-rooted rose bushes, that all need to be stuck into the ground in various places around our back garden. We have half a pallet of concrete retaining-wall bricks in the front yard that need to be moved to the back yard. Our generous neighbors have three wheelbarrows of paving bricks they need us to move from their side yard to our side yard — leftovers from a job we almost finished last weekend. And now it’s raining.
In preparation for a day of garden work, I have a fridge full of good food that only needs to be heated up and eaten. The house is tidy, and the kids have promised to keep it tidy — a promise I know they’ll keep because we gave them the new Harry Potter Lego Wii game. I think video games are a great fun way to teach the kids to play together — and it keeps the house tidy, so I’m a fan.
I did laundry yesterday.
Catherine made breakfast, all by herself.
I do have a couple of errands to run, but mostly, I have the gift of a day at home with not a whole heck of a lot on my to-do list.
It’s a surreal feeling. Did I slip into an alternate universe in which I never had cancer at all? Is this normal life?
Is This For Real?
I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like the time we went to the Bahamas in August of 2006. A hurricane had recently buzzed past the islands and the surf was up — ten and 14 foot swells. We had a beach house, but we couldn’t go swimming, at least not at first. Eventually, the waves grew calm enough for us to swim. My mom kept the kids in the shallows, but Chris and I and my brother went out into the deep.
It was too rough for me. I was still weak from pregnancy, tired from taking care of two toddlers. I had just weaned a few weeks earlier, and, although I didn’t know it, cancer had begun to spread through my body. I couldn’t keep up. I tried to swim in, but I couldn’t, so I asked my brother to help me get to shore, and he did. He and Chris both thought I was faking, or being selfish, or something, but it was my brother who swallowed his annoyance to help me get to a safe place. I was tired, and scared, and I really didn’t want to think about what might have happened. I went inside and took a nap. Read more…
