Sandy Setbacks

We're still seeing the devastation of Hurricane Sandy here. Hard to believe that less than 100 miles away from in NYC there is so much destruction.

What really amazes me is the easily overlooked things that you hear about -- people whose lives are disrupted because they lost electricity or water or had some other damage. Not just the way our everyday lives are interrupted by those things, but how some of the special circumstances people live with have been made that much more difficult. A friend who is caring for her elderly father lost power, and had wisely prepared in advance a way to make sure his medications stayed cold. Then she had to take a day off of work because the building manager had to come to the apartment to check on any damage, and her father would just flip if a stranger was there without her.

It's no picnic for cancer patients, of course. In her excellent column for the New York Times, "Life Interrupted," Suleika Jaouad talks about the extra challenges from Sandy that she faced as a cancer patient -- things most of us wouldn't think of. A monthly chemotherapy appointment that had to be cancelled. The struggle to get in touch with a doctor to figure out how to deal with that. A mandatory evacuation into streets filled with sea water and raw sewage, and worries about infection that might come from that.

It's enough to make a cancer patient (like me) feel pretty damn lucky.

And then there's the sad set back to medical research. Thousands of lab mice were drowned when water flooded the basement of a New York University research center. I'm not sure what kind of research the mice were involved in, but apparently it will take years to get back to the point in the research where things stopped. Worse, it has happened at other research centers in the past, and it was preventable. We could debate the merits of using animals for research (I'm sure my son will debate it with me), but whatever your feelings about mice, it's sad to think that potential cures for diseases have been knocked back.

Hurricane Sandy hit a lot of people very hard. Think about donating to relief efforts if you can. If you're not sure where to start, the Red Cross is a good place to begin.