This was one of the questions our kids asked when we told them about my diagnosis “How did you get it?” and it’s a great question because it’s something I’ve asked myself many times.
It’s a fact that cancer can be caused by human actions. Smoke 3 packs of cigarettes a day and you will almost certainly end up with lung cancer. Get deeply sunburned often, and you’re very likely to get skin cancer.
It seems like really any sort of repetitive irritation of any part of your body can cause cancer potentially (for example the guy that inhaled deeply from his microwave popcorn bag every day…).
But for something like mine - skin cancer of the prostate, it’s a lot less clear how something like that could happen. It’s not like I was suntanning my prostate.
No one has told me any reason for mine, and as far as I can tell there’s no theories for similar cancer. So here’s my only clues/theories I’ve been able to come up with myself.
Before my first diagnosis, in 2018/2019 I had two severe urinary tract infections. Urinary tract infections are rare (and potentially deadly) in men, and there was no clear reason why I received them. One was so bad that I actually started hallucinating. Now was this an early sign of the cancer or was it the cause? There’s no real way of knowing.
Random bad luck of radiation. I’ve learned a lot about cells recently and how cancer works. The basic is that cancer cells are regular cells that have gone haywire, and don’t listen to your body’s command to destroy themselves. One way that can happen is from mutations. One way mutations happen is when ionizing radiation strikes a cell, it has a chance of messing it’s DNA up, and that then becomes cancer (this is how skin cancer works). When you’re flying in an airplane, you receive higher amounts of radiation since the atmosphere is thinner. A transpacific flight gives as much radiation as a chest X-ray. I was recently talking to a nuclear physicist and they said they are not allow to fly with radiation meters because people back at the lab would freak out at the measurements they received. The year before my cancer diagnosis I flew 140,000 miles including 6 transpacific flights. Getting radiation is no guarantee of cancer, but I picture it like rolling a set of 100-sided dice. 99% of the time, you’re not going to roll a “2”, but roll the dice enough times and you’ll get unlucky, i definitely increased my odds when I did a lot of travel. Not to mention who knows what the security scanners in other countries use.
Something else environmental - Pittsburgh. The startup I worked at, Vivisimo (and later IBM), in Squirrel Hill has had what seems like an unusually large amount of rare cancer cases in young people. In an office with less than 100 people, there are at least 5 including myself that have been diagnosed with rare cancers under the age of 55. Every one of them was different, and we worked in a boring office building not an asbestos factory so it doesn’t clearly point to a reason. But maybe Pittsburgh itself is the common thread? We know our air is terrible, there’s been problems with the water etc… I don’t have enough data here to say for sure, but this would be my top theory.
Something else environmental - Glen Burnie. The town I grew up in was a blue collar suburb of Baltimore, I’ve also lost quite a few friends young, although not all from cancer. I grew up on Furnace Creek, which feeds into Curtis Bay (which you may know from Season 2 of The Wire). This was a polluted river (I remember seeing dead fish wash up in large amounts, and awful smells of industry), and yet we used to water ski, tube and eat crabs out of it all the time. The amount of Furnace Creek water I probably drank accidentally over the years is frightening.
In the end, I think I was just unlucky, but maybe one day they will identify the cause to help others. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic recommends to prevent cancer. For what it’s worth, I’d give myself an A in all of these things except number 2 (Eat Healthy Foods), which I’d give myself a C+ in rather than an F. While in general I didn’t eat much sugar and kept my calories under 3000 per day, it was pretty rare that I ate fruit and I have been known to throw back a few beers on weekends. As a distribution of all Americans, I’m pretty sure my diet was on the healthier side, but maybe it could have helped.
I have three abnormal genes. My guess would be contact (breathing, skin) with poison, e.g., Round-Up, followed by air pollution. I spent many years cycling through Western PA breathing in not so great air. And every food ingredient with more than eight characters.
Thank you for sharing all this interesting info about the possible ways you and many others could be exposed to the possibility of cancer. At almost 82, I had no knowledge or concern about the many possible causes of cancer we are exposed to in our everyday life. Never heard about radiation exposure when flying! It’s probably a miracle that we don’t all get cancer!!❤️