Lion withdrawl

When people ask me about my leukemia, they want to know what my symptoms were, what the prognosis is. Then comes the next question: how did I get it?

How did I get it? It's bloody cancer, innit? Somewhere in my body, a bone marrow cell mutated in such a fashion as to spread uncontrolledly. It's a metaphorically rich story, but disconcertingly random. People don't like to hear that there's no identifiable cause. We want a crime for which one's sickness is a punishment--I smoked too much, I had too much anal sex, ate too many cheeseburgers, (Spike suggested that "anal sex with cheeseburgers" would be a good answer when people asked me how I got it). If there can't be a transgression, there should at least be a proclivity--I'm old or there's a genetic predisposition or I was dropped on my head as a small child.

That it should be utterly arbitrary is indecent. It points to an indifferent universe, with no kindnes or justice built in

One of the comix Sara lent me had an introduction where the author speculated that childdren's love of stories with goblins and bogeyman is a sublimation of their fear of real threats, like serial killers. Serial killers! What cartoon tabloid world does this guy live in, where serial killers make the top hundred list of genuine threats to the well-being of children?

I have a guess why we love our serial killers so. We miss lions. Our fear instinct applies pretty well to large predators; it pretty much sucks applied to any fundamentally different threat. Children (and adults, for that matter) have been much more in danger of dying from disease than from animal attack for at least the last 4000 years or so, but fear doesn't do a very good job of ptotecting you from disease. It is fairly good at keeping you out of the woods at night.

If you're eaten by a lion, it isn't fair, but it makes sense. It serves a purpose, of a sort (lunch for said feline), and you probably were being careless when it happened. It's no accident that children in fairy tales are eaten by wolves rather than being struck with bubonic plague--we're much more comfortable with dangers you can run away from, no matter how ineffectually.

All that said, there have been numerous factors proposed to increase one's risk of contracting HCL and other leukemias, though few have been really demonstrated. Exposure to benzene, certain pesticides, radiation, certain chemotherapy drugs, wood dust, and high-voltage power lines have been suggested (none of which would seem to apply to me), as has a prior history of mononucleosis (which I have had). If you find any of this reassuring, more power to you.

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