Cancer

Last night I found out that my cousin's husband has a sarcoma that appears to be spreading at a rapid rate. He's 32 years old with two small children. If he dies, and the odds are not looking good, he will be the second person I know to succumb to the condition. The first was a friend from high school who died at 20 years of age. You can imagine all of the life experiences he missed out on. To say that sarcoma is horrible is to state the obvious.

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While I can't get angry at sarcoma, I can get angry over this:

Currently, NCI [National Cancer Institute] allocates only $5.7 million to Sarcoma, out of a total budget of $57 billion.

I remember in the late 80s/early 90s that AIDS activists were running around talking about how everyone was in danger from the HIV virus, and that within a few years that everyone would know someone with AIDS.

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I also remember thinking at the time how stupid it all sounded. I knew that there was very little chance I would get AIDS. I knew that as long as I didn't share hypodermic needles or run around having unprotected sex with strangers that it really wasn't something that would affect me too much (I believe by the early 90s that the nation's blood supply had been pretty well cleaned up so that cases such as Ryan White has pretty much disappeared).

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Well, as we all know, AIDS has gotten plenty of attention and plenty of funding. Thing is, I still don't know anyone who has been diagnosed with AIDS. But I now know of two people that could well die of sarcoma, and I'm not even 30 years old.