There's a lot of 'we don't know' in the world of pediatric oncology. It can be frustrating as fuck as a parent. At some point (for me at least though I imagine many others) you realize that the majority of what is being done is just 'well lets try this out,' and your child is the guinea pig.

But then there's the social aspect of it all which puts a whole other slant on it. Like fa real, I've met 100 kids and at minimum 75 of them were kids of color. Almost 100% of them were working class and under. If you made a map of the cases I can almost guarantee that it would say something socially that no one wants to admit to.

I ask so what caused this to come about, what was the trigger? And I ask this because they always say there was something which triggered it (in fact it's a necessity to follow their lines of treatment/experimentation). They then come back with a list of things as long as the side effects for the drugs they want you to try, meant to say 'it could be anything.' In fact it's probably a core set of things they'll never mention by themselves, instead grouping it with a bunch of other less likely candidates so that hey all seem less likely.

I'm an educated black man. They aren't used to speaking with folk like me or my wife. Like I said we've spoken to other parents. Immigrant parents have the hardest time, because by all accounts they are supposed to be in a better healthcare system, but the communication lines are so problematic. It's like how do you translate Dr. double talk to plain english and then translate it into their native language with google. I've heard folk just going off on some miscommunication shit.

My wife's been really good about trying to educate folk. Because they don't know. They don't know that the doctors don't know. And so when a year and a half down the line they are still dealing with the same shit and worse they think the doctor is el diablo for lying, when in fact it was just cultural miscommunications combined with standard Dr. double talk.

And this is the norm. Like this is the population (from my experience) dealing with this, and so this is it. And it reeks of so many of the societal woes that go back decades at least. And its us that pay the price.

Kids with cancers. I've been asking myself if it really is a new phenomena or if it's just things that happened in the past that didn't have a name. I still don't know for sure. Like perhaps there was cancer centuries ago as well, but even if that were true it wouldn't absolve this modern society of the guilt it should feel for creating this monster that now attacks our children before they even have a chance at life.

*sigh* #hospitaldays after hours.... lots of time for thinking, which can be a good and a bad thing.

█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." © Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."