(no subject)
Jan. 14th, 2008 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWell.
This has been a weekend for health information, at least for me.
My grandfather on my dad's side has been sent to hospital for his third different cancer today. This one's skin cancer. The doctors're pretty sure it's confined to a small area around a mole near his lip that started enlarging and changing colour, so they think they've got all of it. His other two cancers were colon and breast- yes, breast cancer, not skin cancer on the breast. Actual mammary cell involvement. It happens to men, too.
My grandmother on my mother's side has become the kind of old person who wants her headache medications and her stomach medications and her knee medications and has a terrible migraine and ache and whatnot if she doesn't get her way. On the other hand, it's generally agreed that she's taken said meds for so long, in so many varieties and types, that she's immune to the vast majority of commercial painkillers and other such meds, so yay for chemical weirdness, huh?
Not revealed this weekend, but adding into the equation- my dead great-grandmother survived three major operations in a single year at the age of 99- operations that the doctors admitted they wouldn't normally be willing to undertake on a younger senior citizen.
Several of my other kin have been smokers in earnest, and survived to eighty or later (admittedly, a hacky, wheezy, spitty eighty) in spite of it.
One of my great-grandmothers survived being struck by lightning twice.
And one of my great-aunts had two friggin' spleens.
Apparently my family's mutant superpower is that if you want us dead you're just going to have to walk up to us and put $UNPLEASANT_OBJECT through our $EXTREMELY_IMPORTANT_BODY_PART, several times, because otherwise we just keep thrashing around.
This has been a weekend for health information, at least for me.
My grandfather on my dad's side has been sent to hospital for his third different cancer today. This one's skin cancer. The doctors're pretty sure it's confined to a small area around a mole near his lip that started enlarging and changing colour, so they think they've got all of it. His other two cancers were colon and breast- yes, breast cancer, not skin cancer on the breast. Actual mammary cell involvement. It happens to men, too.
My grandmother on my mother's side has become the kind of old person who wants her headache medications and her stomach medications and her knee medications and has a terrible migraine and ache and whatnot if she doesn't get her way. On the other hand, it's generally agreed that she's taken said meds for so long, in so many varieties and types, that she's immune to the vast majority of commercial painkillers and other such meds, so yay for chemical weirdness, huh?
Not revealed this weekend, but adding into the equation- my dead great-grandmother survived three major operations in a single year at the age of 99- operations that the doctors admitted they wouldn't normally be willing to undertake on a younger senior citizen.
Several of my other kin have been smokers in earnest, and survived to eighty or later (admittedly, a hacky, wheezy, spitty eighty) in spite of it.
One of my great-grandmothers survived being struck by lightning twice.
And one of my great-aunts had two friggin' spleens.
Apparently my family's mutant superpower is that if you want us dead you're just going to have to walk up to us and put $UNPLEASANT_OBJECT through our $EXTREMELY_IMPORTANT_BODY_PART, several times, because otherwise we just keep thrashing around.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 03:48 pm (UTC)My dad's family is the same way on a smaller scale - very long-lived, although they have a regrettable tendency to go insane.
My mom's family, OTOH, has been dropping like flies since time began. My cousin and I joke that our grandmother cooked for five children for years and three of them are still alive, cue false applause. (My cousin and I are morbid and depraved, and also hard on Oma's cooking. At least we can find common humour in our lack of mothers?)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 08:07 pm (UTC)Well, I find it rather amusing.
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Date: 2008-01-14 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 04:29 am (UTC)I'm actually hoping that he's right and I take after that, because there's Alzheimer's on the other side and that terrifies me like no other health problem ever