Sunday, August 2, 2009

Cancer of convenience...

Having lost a mother and a grandmother to ovarian cancer, I know that it is not something to be taken lightly. So when my older brother told me a few months back that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was one of those "the gods hate us" moments. However, the cancer was detected at a very early stage and the doctor told my 57 year old brother, "You know, this is a very slow growing cancer and if you were 10 years older I wouldn't recommend that we even treat it." Since then, my brother has begun is treatment, which seems to be proceeding well and the prognosis is, thankfully, excellent.

Which brings me to Christopher Dodd...under a lot of criticism for getting a sweetheart mortgage and then lying about it and his poll numbers against likely rivals falling like Lindsay Lohan at the end of a happy hour, he announces he has prostate cancer and, magically, the criticism stops, he is bombarded with well wishes, and I have already read one reference to his "brave fight with cancer."

I'm sorry...I have to call "bullshit" on this one. Not on the cancer, on the timing. It's just too, too convenient. If Senator Dodd has, indeed, just been diagnosed with "an early stage" of prostate cancer, I suspect he was given the option of either not treating it at all or waiting and monitoring its progress before they resorted to anything invasive. More cynically, it is possible that the diagnosis is months - years? - old, and the senator has pulled the cancer card out of his sleeve to save his butt right now.

Obviously, I have no inside information on the senator's condition and, as a fellow human, I sincerely hope his treatment is successful. But the timing on all this just seems, well...convenient.

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