Category: North Carolina Botanical Garden

I can’t stop thinking about something a naturopathic oncologist told my sister, who was recently diagnosed with endometrial cancer, the same kind of cancer I had. Apparently having blood group A is associated with an increased risk of cancer, and blood group O is associated with a decreased risk of cancer. Both my sister and I have type A blood.

Coincidentally, a few days after learning this, while going through another one of my family history boxes — I’m now on box #6 of the 14 — I found my mother’s blood type A identification card from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she was receiving treatment for metastasized breast cancer in 1990. She died when she was 59, in spite of four years of surgery, radiation and multiple chemotherapies.

As I was pondering the significance of now knowing her blood type, it hit me that her father, my grandfather, had prostate cancer. (I have no way of discovering what his blood type was.) With some aggressive treatments he survived his cancer and lived to the age of 95.

And then I started wondering about my grandfather’s parents. Locating his father’s death certificate I discovered that he died at age 75 of adenocarcinoma of the transverse colon, metastasis to liver. He had surgery in August of 1948 and died in July of 1949.

Finding these connections for four generations in a row is unsettling, as looking closely at genograms can often be. If I could trace it I wonder how far back the cancer line would go. All my children have type O blood so likely they will be spared from this specific cancer risk factor.

The gene for type A blood is dominant, and the gene for type O is recessive. Which means I have a recessive O gene that I passed on to my children. (They got their other O gene from Tim. One needs two O genes to have type O blood. Tim also has type O blood so that’s the only kind of gene he could give them.) It surprises me that none of them got the dominant A gene from me because the law of averages suggests that half of my children could have received it and had type A blood!

Until my sister consulted one, I never knew that naturopathic oncologists existed. After witnessing the nightmare I’m living through due to radiotherapy aftereffects she is not interested in submitting to the same recommended treatment for her cancer. We both are of the mind that sometimes, for some people, quality of life is more valuable than a prolonged quantity of life. It will be interesting to see what things we will learn about other treatments from this alternative, integrative physician.

Meanwhile, the current administration continues its efforts to cut funding for health care and cancer research. And now this:

If you’re under 65 and don’t have a chronic condition, there’s a very real chance you won’t have access to a Covid-19 vaccine this fall. Much depends on what happens next month. ACIP could defy the FDA and recommend vaccines for broader use, but that would be risky. We’ve never been in this situation before. ….. This isn’t about whether everyone needs a yearly Covid-19 vaccine—that’s a legitimate, ongoing scientific debate, and one ACIP was already tackling in June. This is about how decisions are made—and who gets to make them. FDA political appointees are sidelining expert panels, bypassing transparency, and turning public health into a performance. That might fly in other arenas, but shouldn’t when it comes to people’s health and daily lives. ….. Vaccine decisions must be rooted in evidence, debate, and transparency. ….. If this is the new model, we should all be alarmed.
~ Katelyn Jetelina
(Your Local Epidemiologist, May 21, 2025)

Closer to home, last summer I endured three episodes of seed tick bites on my legs following walks in the botanical garden. I thought I had solved the problem by using recommended permethrin as a repellent but when I took a walk there on Tuesday I was attacked again and now have 9 bites. I’m done! The pictures in this post are not worth the price I’m paying to have gotten them!