Autumn Pink!

I've been aware of the Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month Challenge for a while but have not had much joy finding any pink in the landscape ... until now, when this lovely lady provided me with a little gift on another day of murky greyness and light drizzle.

It's so perfectly obvious that prevention is better than cure that it continues to amaze me how our health care system is still so predominantly reactive. People only normally get treatment once they are seriously ill, when healing becomes much more difficult (if not impossible) and very much more expensive. I lost my father to cancer over thirty years ago, when he was younger than I am now. If it had been detected earlier he could well have been treated and lived to know my children. It is possibly the greatest sadness of my life that he never got to meet my boys and that they never had a chance to know him. They would have loved his sense of fun and his laughter so much.

He was perhaps guilty of being in denial about his illness. He delayed seeing a doctor. I think most of us, in truth, are a bit like this, expecting problems to go away and not really wanting to get a diagnosis in case we receive news we don't want to hear. I certainly fall into that category. It's very human. It's perfectly natural to be more than a little afraid. I think we have to be helped to help ourselves.

I would love to see more emphasis placed on screening and regular health checks for everyone. And I think we have perhaps to be bullied a little and even given incentives. As medical technology and expertise advances we are being faced with incredibly difficult questions. There is no limit to the amount of money that can be thrown at curing people with serious illness. We are at a point where we cannot treat all the people that in theory we could treat. It's simply too expensive. Surely it would be far better to invest more in helping to prevent people getting seriously ill in the first place.

I'm again back home late and the clock seems to be ticking faster than ever against this deadline next week. Apologies for being even worse than normal at commenting back to you all. Please bear with me!