clutching at straws?
Venetia did a lot of wishing and praying when she was a little girl helplessly watching her mother die from breast cancer, and now that she’s older and works in the nursing profession she feels that her wishing and praying somehow has more clout and will save her, and other women, from the same awful fate.
“I do have grave fears that I will die young from breast cancer just like my mother,” says Venetia, “and I worry a lot about my stepmother, too.”
“I am an avid Internet researcher on cancer and with every article I read I feel I am coming closer to the real cause of cancer and its proper treatment,” says Venetia. “They told me that my mother’s cancer wasn’t genetic, but I’ve read lots of articles that say it runs in families with or without genetic involvement and this means that an environmental factor must be involved – a food, a virus, a mold, whatever.”
“I became a nurse to 'be helpful' but also to be around people researching the causes of breast cancer,” says Venetia, “but every time I raise the issue with cancer researchers they laugh at me.”
“They say I am just engaging in magical thinking, clutching at straws," says Venetia, "but I don't think the trauma I suffered as a child has impaired my faculties as much as they think it has."
“I refuse to believe them on the basis that medical research - especially if it is paid for by drug companies - is not always right,” says Venetia. “I saw what cancer treatment did to my beautiful mother and even today my father swears they the treatment killed my mother, not the cancer.”
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