The (B)light of our Lives

It is two weeks since I posted on this blog.  I had had it in mind to write again about the refugee crisis but I haven't felt able to express what I wanted to say.  I have at least two unfinished attempts in my drafts.

However, this weekend something happened which took my thoughts and turned them upside down and inside out.  A friend has died from one of the most aggressive cancers I have ever had the misfortune to hear about.  Diagnosed a very short while ago and gone this weekend.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Family Diseases Tree.  I had based it on the issue of diabetes but ended the post with a World Health Organisation quote about 'non-communicable diseases' in general - cancers, heart disease, diabetes, etc.  About how much more remains to be done to combat these diseases.

And once again, along with far too many others, a family has been torn apart.  It has seemed incredible to all those who have had to watch this happen that in in this day and age, in a modern society, someone can be taken so fast.  The doctors knew what it was but were powerless.  The disease was unstoppable. 

Yet billions are spent every day on wars, on political campaigns, on super yachts, on an endless list of unnecessary things.  It is more than time for things to change.  Eddie Izzard has run twenty seven marathons in twenty seven days.  He has raised millions.  It has been a staggering achievement.  Except that every day, while he was running, other human beings were spending that same amount of money like it really does grow on trees.  On things to kill other humans, things to make even more unneeded cash, things to make themselves feel good.

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On a less general note, I have also written before about how a family tree does not really show the truth of a person's existence.  You might look at a tree and think 'oh, they had no living relations when they died' or 'she lost her children in infancy' and not always stop to think about the implications of those pronouncements.  Or about the people that they would hopefully have had around them.  I wrote about needing a 'friends tree' as well as a family tree if we were to see the full picture.

On my tree, the friend who has died would appear at the time I became a parent.  She was already the parent of a toddler when I staggered to my first post-natal group clutching a three month old baby.  And during that period, when I had my two children, she was a wonderful person to be around.  There was a tight group of us.  All trying to come to terms with our new situations as parents.  To survive the pregnancies, the sleeplessness.  But also to celebrate the good times together.  She was a great one for celebrations.  A beautiful cake for every occasion.  Laughter, love and food.  And a few drinks too.  As our children grew up, that closeness ended.  There was never a fall out, just a moving on.  She always threw herself completely into life at whatever stage she was at.  In recent years, it was her theatre work.  The last time I had more than a fleeting conversation with her, she and her family had joined an annual camping trip that a few of us always organise.  I remember sitting by the river, watching the children swim, chatting and having a glass of wine.  She was sewing or knitting, as I recall.

Friends come and go in your life.  But I cannot bear to think that she is not somewhere, even if I had not seen her for a while.  Another one taken too soon, as another friend said this weekend.

Family Diseases Tree

So this week before writing, I looked back at what I wrote this time last year.  Sadly, a great deal of it was connected with the death of my own father-in-law and it is not an easy readback.  However, in some ways, it seems like far longer than a year ago.  My mother- and brother-in-law have not coped well with the loss.  Well, he was not coping before that really and if you looked at previous posts, you will know of the alcoholism which has consumed him.

 

We have lurched from crisis to crisis in the last twelve months.  Culminating in  my mother-in-law being hospital herself on the anniversary this week.  She broke her arm in a fall.  The fall was caused by a diabetic low.  The diabetic low, the doctors now think, was caused by early dementia.  She is not remembering what she has eaten/taken or when (it was even discovered last month that she had, for reasons best known to herself, thrown away the emergency injections from the fridge).  Quite a chain of events but one which it has taken many near misses to diagnose.  Falls without actually breaking anything.  Being found unconscious due to the diabetes but being brought round just in time.  Many incidents of slightly odd behaviour that we hoped were just age rather than the degenerative dementia.  So we start the second year with a whole new scenario but one with which, due to her location in western Ireland, we are struggling to assist.

 

Actually, both diabetes and dementia run in her family.  (Although for years, when my husband mentioned diabetes being passed down, she denied this!)  So what did the generations before do?  Close ranks and keep the person at home if it was dementia?  Just find a person unconscious on the floor when it came to diabetes?  My mother-in-law was born in 1933.  It was only around ten years prior to that when the first clinical diabetes treatment was made, although apparently there has been an awareness of diabetes symptoms since the times of ancient Greece.  (see Wikipedia for more information).  Dementia, of course, still has no effective treatment.

 

This is what the World Health Organisation website says:

 

Noncommunicable [by which they mean non-infectious] diseases were responsible for 68% of all deaths globally in 2012, up from 60% in 2000. The 4 main NCDs are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic lung diseases. Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutrition conditions collectively were responsible for 23% of global deaths, and injuries caused 9% of all deaths...

 

...In high-income countries, 7 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. People predominantly die of chronic diseases: cardiovascular diseases, cancers, dementia, chronic obstructive lung disease or diabetes. Lower respiratory infections remain the only leading infectious cause of death. Only 1 in every 100 deaths is among children under 15 years.

 

I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that at least one of my mother-in-law's grandparents had diabetes.  Her mother was born at the turn of the century and developed the disease.  A number of her siblings - of which there were around a dozen - have succumbed to it.  Or to dementia.  (Or both).

 

So in that family alone, there is over 120 years of diabetic history.  And they may be classed as having lived in a high income country but their own family background was, quite frankly, very poor.  Subsistence farming.  Plain food.  Few treats.  It is genetic.

 

More should be done to research these 'non-communicable diseases'.  The sad deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman in recent days have once again shone a light on the lack of treatments for some cancers.  President Obama has promised a push to 'beat cancer'.  But it is not just cancer that needs to be tackled.  We are encouraging developing countries to catch the high income countries up.  So it follows that we are storing up a future of increases in these causes of death.  Only recently, I heard a piece about how breast cancer research funding will only really take off when the world's biggest population - China - begins to see the effects of its modernisation on its people's health.  No-one wishes for another human to be ill.  We should not be waiting for these shifts to happen.  These diseases should not need to be trailing through centuries of family health.