Ignorance & Cancer
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"Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever."
- Aristophanes
I used to think that the ignorance of my youth referred to my bad decisions in my teens and twenties. I now know that, even when I'm 80, I will be ignorant of something. I'm embarrassed to admit how ignorant I was about cancer, even at the "wise-old" age of thirty-something. It's not that I was a stranger to cancer; I had lost two grandparents to it. But I was young and invincible when they died so I didn't really think about it. After all, to a 10 year old and a 20 year old, they were "old". They were my grandparents. Grandparents die. It's just what happens.
But this is the part of the story where I cringe with embarrassment. My big (sorority) sister got cancer. She was everything to me when I was in college. But we moved to different states, she had kids older than mine, and we had just drifted apart. So, I sent her a "Kick Cancer's Butt" card, thought about her often and that was about it. Meanwhile, she was tending to two children, going through chemo and radiation and maybe even pondering if she was even going to live to see her children graduate from high school.
Boy, do I feel like a schmuck looking back at how I handled things back then.
In hindsight, I felt overwhelmed with my own life, scared that someone I knew and loved could be dealing with such a horrible thing and in all honesty, I felt helpless. Until recently, I thought that cancer was mostly genetic. Turns out, this is totally not true.
I thought cancer happened to other people, not me. It wasn't until this past year, at a routine mammogram, that I realized how untrue this was. I awkwardly sat in the waiting room with a dozen other women, all dressed in robes, all looking at our phones or a magazine, waiting for the nurse to give us the "all clear" and send us on our way. The nurse came, gave everyone the "thanks for coming in, you're good to go" talk, paused and then said, "except for Ms Ralston. Could you stay? The doctor wants to talk a bit more to you." All eyes focused on me, and I could feel everyone's pity along with their relief that they weren't the one being called into the doctor's office. Everything turned out alright, but it could have easily not been fine. 1 in 8 women in the US will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. The fact that more women in that waiting room were not called in to see the doctor, makes me realize just how lucky we all were that day.
I tried to take control of my health through food and exercise. I made a lot of mistakes on my journey. I became a junk-food vegetarian for 8 years, living off of soy products and grains and hardly eating any fruits and vegetables. I chronically exercised, thinking that the more I worked out, the healthier (and thinner) I would become. Today, I eat real food - mostly veggies, some grass-fed, pastured or wild-caught meat and fish, a small amount of fruit, very few grains (except for the occasional sushi, because sushi is soooo yummy!), and very little sugar. My workouts now consist of moving often, 2 or so HIIT workouts a week (lasting no longer than 30 minutes each including warm-up and cool-down), and sprinting once every 7-10 days. I'm not perfect when it comes to food, especially when it comes to what my family eats as a whole, but we're making progress.
But there was a piece that was missing if I was going to truly stack the odds in my favor against cancer. It was what went ON my skin. There are so many things we can't control in life (like the air we breathe), but what we put on our skin is something we CAN control. Turns out that out of over 85,000 chemicals registered for use in the US, many of which are used in personal care products, less than 10% of them have even been studied for safety. The last time Congress passed a major law regulating the cosmetics industry was 1938! The European Union bans 1,400 known or questionable ingredients from use in their personal care products. The US? 30. Seriously. 30.
The final straw was when my daughter, at 2 years of age, had major hormonal issues due to the ingredients in her NATURAL and ORGANIC soaps, shampoos and lotions. I spent the past 10 years scouring labels looking for ingredients that could cause hormone disruption as well as cancer. But I'll be honest, one has to be a full-time scientist simply to be able to pronounce the names of these ingredients, let alone remember what everything is and does. And just because an ingredient has a "technical" name, doesn't mean it's harmful and, just because something is natural and derived from a plant, doesn't mean it's safe.
I can't tell you how relieved I was to find out that there's a company that does all the leg-work for me. Beautycounter is a mission-based company that is dedicated to getting safe products in the hands of everyone. They do this through their safe, high-performing products, their education and the advocacy work they do on a state and federal level to push for safer skincare laws. They have a Never List which is made up of more than 1,500 questionable or harmful ingredients that will never be used in their products. All this couldn't have come at a better time. My eyes have finally caught up with my age and I simply can't read all the fine print on the ingredient labels. Now I don't have to!
I'm sorry for my past ignorance. I hope those I've known and loved will forgive me for being oblivious to their fight. But I'm educated now and I promise I'll help fight and educate others so that no-one has to go through this alone.
