Medical Geneology

My family is involved in a sort of genealogy project, as we construct a family medical history, as we do that now, while we can all still remember.  I was a bit chastened to realize that I don't remember the exact age at which I've had each skin cancer.  The last two I could figure out because I was blogging.  But the first 2?  Was it before the year 2000 that I got my first skin cancer?  No, I'm sure it was not.  It was somewhere around 2002 or 2003, which means I would have been 37 or so, and that feels right.  And then the next one was 2 or 3 years later.

Late in the day yesterday, I took a break from work e-mails and read an e-mail from my mom's cousin, telling us about the breast cancers in our elders.  My grandmother had an aunt, Mary Jane called Jennie, who lived with them, and she had breast cancer.  My mom's cousin wrote:  "I was told that grandpa and she rode the train to Johns Hopkins but they could not help."  So that would have been a brother and sister, taking the train from Tennessee to Johns Hopkins and all for naught.

Then I looked at the rest of the my mom's cousin's message, figured out the dates, and wrote this e-mail:  

"So Mary Jane (Jennie) Crumley was 57 when she died. My age. I am sitting here feeling so sad at the thought of them taking the train to Johns Hopkins but nothing could be done. And that must have been 1938 or 1937, during the Great Depression. They spent that money on train tickets and Johns Hopkins, and it was futile.

Sadness, sadness."

How did they find the money?  I know that they were very poor during the Depression, but because the family farm was in Tennessee and not in the Dust Bowl states, they managed to hang onto it.  Because they had a farm, they always had food and enough to share.  They had holes in their shoes, but they had food, as my grandmother's brother, Uncle Jim, always said.  My grandmother remembered all the quilts they stitched, but not with fondness.  She remembered the desperation.

My grandmother talked about the spinster aunt, Aunt Jenny, who lived with them.  But she never, ever mentioned the breast cancer or the train trip to Johns Hopkins.  I would have remembered that detail.

I know that my poetry brain is churning away at all of this.  My medical history brain is appalled at all the breast cancer running through my family, all the cancers of all sorts of kinds that I hardly remember.  I remember my grandmother's breast cancer, when she was in her 70's, but I always thought that it was the kind of cancer one might get if one lived long enough.  Now I think about my grandmother's sister who also had breast cancer in her 70's, and their aunt, who had breast cancer at a younger age.

Now I am thinking about how the need to schedule a mammogram has suddenly increased in urgency.  Let me add that to my ever-growing to do list.