Getting the message across

So there I was, just off the phone to my boss about an event we're hoping to get to (the AGM of the folks who organised that stonecarving day I did for my birthday), and I go downstairs to check on the progress of my lunch.

All of a sudden, and without any obvious context, my mother asked me "Do you know (friends of my sister and her husband)?"

I sort-of remember them... The guy frequently argues over trivia with my sister's husband, and the girl (his wife) barely says a word... ever... because whatever she says tends to earn sarcasm in response.

Well, to cut a long story short, this girl has just been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.

I say 'just diagnosed' but I hear that she's known about the lumps - and been in considerable pain - for at least a year but was (quote) "too afraid to do anything about it". It seems she hadn't told anyone - family, friends, husband - let alone a doctor, and had been passing the pain off as the result of a horse-riding accident. When she finally told her mother, she was whisked off to a doctor, then to a hospital. When examined, they found her now riddled with tumors and, while they're talking about chemotherapy, they're also pumping her full of morphine and describing it as 'terminal'.

Now, say all you want about me lacking sympathy and/or empathy, but how bloody stupid do you have to be to ignore the steadily worsening signs of cancer because you're too scared to find out whether it is definitely cancer? Hell, years ago, my sister found a lump, went straight to hospital and had it removed. That may not have been pleasant for her (and I only found out about it while she was in hospital), better that than wait a full year, 'soldiering on' through increasing pain, only to find you've left it too late to be treated.

Dumb, dumb, dumb... Seriously, that is a special kind of stupid.

"Now everyone's shattered," my mother said. I'm not bloody surprised! A year ago, this could all have been over and forgotten in a few days... Now this young woman is dying because she was too thick - sorry, scared - to get herself checked out when the first signs presented themselves.

And it's not as if medical practitioners need any cajoling to deal with a cancer scare. A couple of years ago, I went to my doctor with a certain discomfort/swelling and, without anyone so much as uttering the 'c' word, I was sent for an ultrasound scan. I was all clear, and I was relieved. That was the end of it.

In this day and age, when they've been recommending for years that women examine themselves regularly and go to their doctor with anything out of the ordinary, not doing so might as well be considered a deliberately slow suicide... I sympathise with her friends, family and husband, but that's about as far as it goes.