[olologin]

My mother died from pancreatic cancer 5 months ago when she was 55 years old, 9 months after she started noticing pain and doctors started investigating it. The worst thing is that she never worked in any hazardous environments, never smoked, never drank alcohol, avoided fried cuisine, avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden, did not use any chemicals, she wasn't obese, she didn't have diabetes, she didn't have any problems with pancreas or any other significant health issues. None of her close relatives had cancer. For the last 30 years she lived in a very clean region that doesn't have any industrial factories/manufactures.

The only possible hazard she had - she worked for 15 years near busy road, where there was a lot of diesel/gas engine exhaust, but I doubt this is related to her pancreatic cancer, as I found normally this affects lungs/respiratory paths. Maybe she was exposed to some agricultural chemicals in her childhood, because she was living near agricultural fields in the Soviet Union, but I doubt she was significantly exposed to it.

I even joked with her that she was living probably the most cancer-cautious life, and still got cancer. So the worst thing for her is that nobody could tell what she did incorrectly to get this illness. It felt very unfair for her.

[margalabargala]

> avoided GMO-food, she was always eating as much as possible from her own garden

Depending where she lived, this may have been the cause.

Plenty of people unknowingly live and grow food in areas that had toxic waste dumped on them a century ago, and it's still there in the dirt.

GMO food, in addition to not being any worse for you than non-GMO food, generally gets grown in places that have always been agricultural land.

[worik]

> grown in places that have always been agricultural land.

Living in New Zealand they are often the most polluted.

Agri industry is, and was always, very lax about disposing of the extremely toxic chemicals in use

[margalabargala]

My personal understanding (which may be very wrong) is that there are different sorts/mechanisms of pollution involved.

Ag pollution is usually things like herbicide, pesticide, and fertilizer, which can have disastrous effects downstream if it washes into a river, but don't make things grown on that land poisonous as long as you rinse off anything that has been sprayed on them.

This is in contrast to, say, reclaiming farmland in an area that had a textile dye factory upstream.

There are certainly exceptions, for example many old orchards used lead arsenate as a pesticide, contaminating the soil with both lead and arsenic.

[exasperaited]

My sympathies for what must be just an awful time for you —- sporadic pancreatic cancer is just a lurking evil.

My mother died of an unusual form of it, just a little older than yours, when I was in my early twenties. It was terrible.

The only unusual thing was some prior surgery near her pancreas, from twenty years earlier, had apparently had severe scarring that was noticed during surgery to fit a stent.

[olologin]

I am sorry for your loss as well, it was even harder for you in twenties.

[exasperaited]

The thing is that as awful as it was, maybe I personally got through it initially without doing all the grieving, because I thought so much of my grieving had happened after she was diagnosed with such an awful, bleak thing.

In reality I was still dealing with it ten, fifteen years later. Because pre-death grief and post-death grief are different things.

This only really came home to me three and a half years ago when my (elderly) father died after years of moderate dementia; this hit me so hard and continues to weigh on me, and I realised I'd tried to avoid grief when my mother died. I miss my father in a way I never allowed myself to miss my mother, and he had the good long life.

Grief is there whether you want to acknowledge it or not.