CANCER STINKS!

After my return home from the first ER visit, hospital stay, and gastro procedure to unblock a bile duct back in June (see SAGA’ It Begins’), I couldn’t wait to take a shower and wash the ‘hospital smell’ off my body. But that smell lingered in my nose. It was a distinctive smell – on my breath, night gown and sheets. Even in my pee! I began to think it might be the pancreatic cancer.  Turned out, I was right!

No one talks about this aspect of cancer – at least not to me. But an AI search for ‘cancer breath’ turned up lots of discussion about the distinctive odor patterns (referred to as ‘signatures’) that can be found in a person’s tissue, blood, urine, stool or breath.  Each kind of cancer has its own smell. ** There are stories about some dogs that can detect those stinky odors on a person, even before a diagnosis! But I have yet to read that ‘cancer test by dog’, done during annual check-ups, is on the protocol list of doctors in the USA. I can only imagine!

That is not true in the UK however, where some astute scientists doing research in the Ministry of Health decided to study the phenomena of ‘cancer breath’ as a potential diagnostic tool.  Discovering cancer early can be a matter of life or death, ya know.  So, they set about to invent a breath machine (no dogs please!) to sniff a person’s breath and analyze the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by cancer cells. News of this trial completely vindicated me from sounding like a yabbering nut case when I told medical folks I thought my cancer made me stink, to which they would roll their eyes and say…”Oh, I don’t know anything about that”.

Keep in mind, the UK has a completely different health system than the USA. They do research, paid for by people’s taxes, for the benefit of the people. In the USA, that job was given over to ‘big pharma’, who is benefiting more than the people.

So, all this to let you know that not only does cancer stink – really, but it also stinks in terms of disrupting quality of life. Even though I’m pretty much going about my life as usual…for the moment…I worry about my ‘cancer breath’ when in heated public discussions!! (Ha!) For that, I never leave home without a pocket full of peppermint candies.

TJ

**Oh yeah - FYI – Pancreatic cancer breath (according to AI) smells fruity and sweet. Some consolation – hmmm……