Stuff out there

Like most people dealing with cancer, I am trying to learn as much as possible about this hideous disease from a variety of sources: researchers, fellow cancer warriors, books, etc. I've learned alot from my fellow bloggers on what to expect in treatment. Some things just irritate me however even in scientific papers e.g. the use of the word lethal. This is a favorite word in the popular press- as in lethal heat wave, which is used when 3 elderly people die out of millions during a heat wave. I've come to expect it in articles in the popular press about TNBC but when I see it in scientific articles, it just makes me mad as they rarely define what exactly they mean by 'lethal' other than if all things being equal, TNBC is more lethal than non-TNBC.

Recently I was given a book which has in the title two words that do not belong together: sexy and cancer. Of course that may be just my opinion. I see nothing sexy about being completely hairless, being devoid of oil and other glands, having constant watery eyes and nose, etc. But that didn't make me the maddest: it was the section on an anti-cancer diet full of half and no truths. My favorite was the importance of keeping one's body alkaline versus acid. One way allegedly to tell if your body has the wrong acidity is to take the pH of your pee. If it is acid, you presumably have the wrong diet. The truth is if it is basic, it's due to ammonia and something inside of you is converting urea (acidic) to ammonia (basic)-probably bacteria or end stage renal failure. Also a section of the dangers of meat eating beyond the usual caveats concerning saturated fats, hormone and antibiotic infested flesh, I learned that meat presumbly gives off radioactivity and putrefies in your gut for almost a month. On what planet!

There are some funny things out there in cyber space such as a blog devoted to inappropriate use of quotation marks (see http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/) and church signs (http://crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com/).

I resumed my running yesterday going almost 3 miles. My breast didn't hurt once the endorphins kicked in. The weather is going to be bad for the next few days. They are predicting a winter storm tonight that might dump 2 to 10 inches of snow. Yikes.

I dragged Steve to part of the Italian film festival to see "Hotel Meina" which was very loosely based on the Italian Holocaust. Up to 1943, Italy was a relatively safe haven for Jews but then the Italians surrendered to the Allies. This at first sounded like good news but the Nazis were free to come into Italy and do their evil. The movie was about a small hotel near the Swiss border where some Jews were vacationing in a hotel owned by a Turkish Jewish family. This hotel was the first place the Nazis came to after crossing the border and they took it over imprisonning the Jewish guests. As the owners had Turkish passports, they were exempted from the mess as Turkey was a neutral country. It was a sad and disturbing movie.