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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2653 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How old do you think were when the transition from your parents worrying about your health to you worrying about their health happened?

I'd say late 20s for me, not very long back really. They're in their 60s now. I suppose it's confounded by the fact we're all doctors, and I have a (small) degree of confidence that they can look after themselves and vice versa. Still have to yell at my dad to get his heart checked, and my mom to up her semaglutide dose, but they need to check in on me too so it all cancels out.

I was only around 9 when I tried really hard (but failed) to get my mom to quit smoking. In later years she tried a couple times to quit unprompted, but only managed to cut her habit in half. I was around 36 when the lung tumors got her, while her last grandchild was still a baby too young to talk.

Ironically she managed to quit cold turkey as soon as she saw the blotches on a lung x-ray, though at that point the cancer had metastasized and she only had months left. I think if she'd known she really was capable of quitting she'd have managed to do it decades earlier.

My dad I never worried about until he had some major health scares starting that same year; he hardly touched anything more vegetable-like than iceberg lettuce or corn, but even after he'd retired he generally exercised (doing volunteer work) well enough to counterbalance his diet, and the cancer that got him was probably mostly bad genes on that side of the family.

Fuckin cancer, man. You stay well.

Thanks. I got my first tumor cut out a couple years ago, but it was only a basal cell carcinoma, which is like the yapping baby chihuahua of cancers. Fortunately, too; if I'd ignored anything actually dangerous for so long ("boy it's weird that this scar is still sensitive to any little scrape", I thought to myself intermittently for a year, as I literally put band-aids on my damned cancer) I'd be dead.

I'm not old yet but I've already had a life to be immensely grateful for. What's killing me (albeit only metaphorically so far) is that, as the name would suggest, bad genes are genetic. Not only did I get my dad's allele, so did at least one of my kids. Of all cancer's victims in my extended family so far, though, only one died really early, IIRC in her 40s; everybody else either died around 70, or got cancer in their 60s but managed to beat it for now. Even my dad almost managed to beat his; it looked cured and it didn't recur for a year. Hopefully we'll have made even more oncology progress by the time my kids need it.

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