I've Just Been Orphaned; and Nature and Medicine Have Some Explaining to Do

THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2021: Good evening, Climate Strikers all; I'm writing tonight with some sad personal news. My Mom, Eileen Olsen, previously ageless and seemingly evergreen, succumbed very quickly to glioblastoma multiforme, less than four months after her initial diagnosis. Perhaps it's a good thing, in a way, that she didn't stick around to reach the stage of having seizures, with her mind totally scrambled; but her condition began deteriorating rapidly soon after finishing a course of radiation therapy and specialized chemo drugs. This was probably partly due to the progression of the tumor itself; but it was quite likely due in part to her refusal to live as an invalid in a bed or wheelchair, who had seemingly aged a dozen years overnight. She didn't (and couldn't) take her own life, as she didn't have direct access to her medications in the Nursing Care division of her facility in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee; and she didn't have the energy even to get out of bed or stand upright without assistance. But she was sending out clear signals to life, the universe, and everything that she was fed up with this sort of existence, and wanted the hell out of here. A few days before she passed on (which occurred on the evening of Friday, May 14), I began being able to talk to her in Spirit, and see clear images of her standing here in my own living space; hence I figured she must be slipping between worlds (what old-timers used to call being "betwixt and between"), and was on her way out of this physical reality.

At any rate, here I am at present, an adult orphan (my Dad passed away from slow-growing liver cancer in March 2009), wondering how the hell someone with no family history of cancer whatsoever developed a rare, highly aggressive, malignant brain tumor. And there's not much use Googling "what causes glioblastoma", as the general consensus in the research community is that they don't yet have a clue, though some are floating the idea that it may develop from an over-exposure to x-rays. My brother suspects that said excessive exposure to x-rays came from Mom's experiences getting zapped repeatedly at a dental clinic of questionable expertise and ethics, where they persuaded her to get all her lower teeth pulled, and replaced with dentures, in response to recurring lower tooth infections which had plagued her for some time. This could be the case, though I myself wonder if her frequent falls, including hitting her head on hard objects, could have also played a role. Moreover, her repeated overmedication by various doctors of middling quality in east Tennessee probably didn't help matters much.

At any rate, the relevant question regarding glioblastoma and this blog would be: how did a form of brain cancer, until recently considered extremely rare, start skyrocketing in new cases during the past twenty years or so? One could ask the same question about slow-growing liver cancer (the kind my Dad struggled with for about 5 1/2 years), which is still pretty rare, but also increasing in rates of new diagnoses. The immediate cause of most cancers is a genetic mutation on a cellular level; but what in heck causes the mutation, beyond a random throw of the DNA dice? It's said that age is a significant risk factor for glioblastoma; but it's been known to strike people of practically any age.

The media's handpicked medical experts have long blamed lifestyle choices for increasing rates of cancer of all kinds. It's obesity, it's junk food, it's fast food, it's smoking, it's sugary beverages, it's casual sex, it's electromagnetic spikes or whatever; in other words, it's your fault. They seldom talk about environmental toxins, workplace exposure to toxic materials, ultraviolet radiation, or climate change as risk factors. Shoot, shining a light on that stuff might wreck the economy (the same thing they say about any legally-mandated improvements in environmental protection or worker safety). You practically have to twist their arms off to get them to talk about family health history.

Anyway...today, both my parents' remains are sitting in small boxes in the office of one of the administrative staffers at Crossville First United Methodist Church, waiting for my brother and me to decide the long-term fate of both sets of ashes. I tried to convince my bro that donating a piece of our Mom's brain tissue to medical research might be a good contribution to the world's overall knowledge of glioblastoma. Alas, I couldn't seem to talk him into that (in his role as executor of Mom's estate); he figured that the cancer research world has plenty of brain tissue samples already, and Mom's will and advance directive spelled out that she didn't wish to be an organ donor. I think my parents' ashes may be composted into the Methodist church's memorial garden, with a portion of both remains collected for a proposed scattering off the coast of Maine somewhere. It was one of my folks' favorite vacation spots for many years. I don't know if human ashes retain any genetic material or not.