Chris Hoy.

[AnthonyH]

I’d never thought about this but you may have a point. I’m probably a good 10 years younger than you but I’m probably of the last generation who would go out on a Friday/Saturday night and smoke a pack of cigarettes along side a few pints, this was before the smoking ban kicked in, so now isn’t going to happen, these days. Younger generations seem to be a lot more healthy in terms of smoking and drinking. But I wonder if inactivity will catch up with them? I also wonder what long term impacts e-cigarettes and vaping will have, as so many younger people do this now and we don’t fully know what affect this will have on people over the course of say 50 years.

I can't say i miss the drinking culture that was common, beer in a pub is quite expensive these days so getting bladdered costs more than most young people want to pay for. Talking of expense, fast food has suddenly become so expensive that its cheaper to go to a pub and have a sit down meal in some places.

Vapes only contain nicotine, which while addictive isn't harmful in my opinion, its the same nicotine that is in cigarettes but without the cancer inducing chemicals. The vapes should be discouraged of course, young people do take it up because they think it looks cool.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I can't say i miss the drinking culture that was common, beer in a pub is quite expensive these days so getting bladdered costs more than most young people want to pay for. Talking of expense, fast food has suddenly become so expensive that its cheaper to go to a pub and have a sit down meal in some places.

Me neither, though 18 year old me would probably disagree.

I used to be a smoker, I used to get through a pack a day in from when I was about 18 till my late 20s. I stopped completely in 2008 or there abouts after the smoking ban and after I got divorced from someone who used to smoke, its very hard to quit when you have someone who is trying to keep you smoking.

Anyway when I gave up it was about £5 a packet of 20 but a few weeks ago I stood in a queue behind someone buying cigarettes' and it was an eye watering £12 nearly £13 for a packet of 20. which if you smoke 20 a day works out to nearly £5k a year. now it seems very rare to see anyone smoking actual cigarettes'.

Vapes only contain nicotine, which while addictive isn't harmful in my opinion, its the same nicotine that is in cigarettes but without the cancer inducing chemicals. The vapes should be discouraged of course, young people do take it up because they think it looks cool.

So Nicotine is actually a very dangerous poison, it can be lethal in doses over 0.5mg per KG meaning in theory you could kill a 100kg adult with 50mg of nicotine, where as your typical paracetamol pain killer is about 500mg per tablet.

There is about 10 - 12mg of nicotine per cigarettes' which if smoked you only inhale around 1 - 1.5mg but most people who are older than 40 will know someone who smoked 40 or even 60 a day in the past.

There are countless stories of dogs dying from eating cigarette ends because the nicotine is still highly poisonous. The main issue with Vapes is that they can often contain an unknown quantity of nicotine, and with a cigarette people would have to go outside to smoke, and deliberately light up and smoke that cigarette, but with vapes they can do it almost continuously without realizing and without knowing how much nicotine they are getting.
There are also a lot of studies done into the effects of inflammation of the lung tissues, fluid build up in the lungs and some people have become very severely ill and even died without even having nicotine in their vapes so I think in years to come like smoking, its going to become another thing that is found to cause severe long term problems after years of using them.

 

[AnthonyH]

Me neither, though 18 year old me would probably disagree.

I used to be a smoker, I used to get through a pack a day in from when I was about 18 till my late 20s. I stopped completely in 2008 or there abouts after the smoking ban and after I got divorced from someone who used to smoke, its very hard to quit when you have someone who is trying to keep you smoking.

I smoked from age 20 to 32. I never really enjoyed it, it was more habit than anything. I can remember the yellow fingers i had most vividly! And remember the pubs that had dense smoke in the rooms, it was like fog!

There was a kind of bonding effect that smoking had on friends, i suppose because its something thats often done in pairs.

Anyway when I gave up it was about £5 a packet of 20 but a few weeks ago I stood in a queue behind someone buying cigarettes' and it was an eye watering £12 nearly £13 for a packet of 20. which if you smoke 20 a day works out to nearly £5k a year. now it seems very rare to see anyone smoking actual cigarettes'.

So Nicotine is actually a very dangerous poison, it can be lethal in doses over 0.5mg per KG meaning in theory you could kill a 100kg adult with 50mg of nicotine, where as your typical paracetamol pain killer is about 500mg per tablet.

There is about 10 - 12mg of nicotine per cigarettes' which if smoked you only inhale around 1 - 1.5mg but most people who are older than 40 will know someone who smoked 40 or even 60 a day in the past.

There are countless stories of dogs dying from eating cigarette ends because the nicotine is still highly poisonous. The main issue with Vapes is that they can often contain an unknown quantity of nicotine, and with a cigarette people would have to go outside to smoke, and deliberately light up and smoke that cigarette, but with vapes they can do it almost continuously without realizing and without knowing how much nicotine they are getting.
There are also a lot of studies done into the effects of inflammation of the lung tissues, fluid build up in the lungs and some people have become very severely ill and even died without even having nicotine in their vapes so I think in years to come like smoking, its going to become another thing that is found to cause severe long term problems after years of using them.

I wasn't aware of these effects of nicotine. I've never vaped and can't see much reason to start. I'm sure its safer than cigarettes, so its an improvement of sorts, i guess.

 

[AnthonyH]

Thinking of pubs i came across some Laurel and Hardy gifs that made me laugh lol

This is not my GP...

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

An ex member was spouting a load of racist/argumentative drivel.

Nothing to do with you old chap

In that case thank you very much. One of the really nice things about this forum is that I see very little of that sort of thing. I'm a "live and let live" kind of person in that I take people as I find them regardless of their colour sex or anything else. We're aw Jock Tamson's bairns in my book.

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

As Ben said there was someone trying to turn this into a horrible racist argument, I tried to discuss this with him, but it was apparent that the whole thread was being spoilt and railroaded into some pretty awful comments on the part of this other person so I reported it asking if the whole thread could be cleaned up returning it to the well meaning thread it had been to start with. including deleting the posts I had made.

Thanks very much Andy - 100% behind you on this

 

[vexorg]

I think the best Chris Hoy story was them not letting him in the "Chris Hoy Velodrome" because he didn't have ID

 

[PuntoHowTo]

I think the best Chris Hoy story was them not letting him in the "Chris Hoy Velodrome" because he didn't have ID

I must have missed that one, made my laught out loud just now.

I see today him and i his wife have gone away to get out of the country for a bit and let the media storm calm down, can’t be easy when you are going through something like that and then you have to deal with the intrusive press as well.

In my reading I see that his cancer was diagnosed of a secondary tumour that caused pain in his shoulder, and once investigated they found that the primary was in the prostate with spread all over the body, sadly for him he was at a very advanced stage of cancer when he was diagnosed, at which time options for treatment becomes very limited.

Primary cancer = the place where the cancer starts
Secondary cancer = other tumours that appear else where in the body.

So if you have a prostate primary cancer, and they find a secondary cancer in say for example the liver, when they biopsy that liver tumour it will show prostate cells where they very much shouldn’t be. As jock pointed out you can be really unlucky and have multiple primary cancers which if this happens you could have two cancers that need different and conflicting treatments.

Fortunately or unfortunately cancer is so complex it’s sometimes very difficult to understand why one cancer has good survivability and others do not.

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

I must have missed that one, made my laught out loud just now.

I see today him and i his wife have gone away to get out of the country for a bit and let the media storm calm down, can’t be easy when you are going through something like that and then you have to deal with the intrusive press as well.

In my reading I see that his cancer was diagnosed of a secondary tumour that caused pain in his shoulder, and once investigated they found that the primary was in the prostate with spread all over the body, sadly for him he was at a very advanced stage of cancer when he was diagnosed, at which time options for treatment becomes very limited.

Primary cancer = the place where the cancer starts
Secondary cancer = other tumours that appear else where in the body.

So if you have a prostate primary cancer, and they find a secondary cancer in say for example the liver, when they biopsy that liver tumour it will show prostate cells where they very much shouldn’t be. As jock pointed out you can be really unlucky and have multiple primary cancers which if this happens you could have two cancers that need different and conflicting treatments.

Fortunately or unfortunately cancer is so complex it’s sometimes very difficult to understand why one cancer has good survivability and others do not.

The pancreatic which got my youngest brother is not a nice one - silly choice of words, sorry - another reason why I take everything they offer be it free jags, health checks or whatever, and self refer to my GP with serious worries. Don't put off folks. As an example, a while ago I got some bleeding from my derriere (bum) I can tell you it's very scary when the toilet paper comes away with blood on it! I actually shook for a few minutes. I thought I'd let it lie till "next time" which was later on the same day when the result was, if anything, a bit worse. Damn it, nothing for it, got to ring the doc. Reception tried to put me off with "no appointments available" but I managed to get them to agree to a doctor ringing me back. This resulted in an immediate investigation and diagnosis of internal hemorrhoids. unpleasant but not life threatening. So don't be a wimp folks, get checked out if you're worried. I'm too old now for the free bowel smear tests but I still voluntarily request them. Often it won't be as bad as you're imagination is thinking it is and if it is something "Nasty" the sooner someone does something about it the better.

 

[vexorg]

One of my biggest problems with cancer is that I can never quite get my head round what it is, a disease attacking the dna, or the body attackling itself, or what? When you ask semi-medical people (nurses ) they say it's "just cancer"

 

[PuntoHowTo]

One of my biggest problems with cancer is that I can never quite get my head round what it is, a disease attacking the dna, or the body attackling itself, or what? When you ask semi-medical people (nurses ) they say it's "just cancer"

Cancer is where your own DNA becomes corrupted (best way to explain it) it happens all the time in the body given the millions of cells we are made from and so there are systems in place to prevent any issues (apoptosis) the cells are supposed to kill themselves off if there is something seriously wrong, or in less severe cases there are ways the DNA can mend itself, like a form of error correction.

But when these systems fail we have cancer, the mutated cell duplicates itself with the error, which also duplicates itself and so on and on till we end up with a mass of faulty cells, which are still part of the body so the immune system doesn’t attack them, and actually builds blood vessels into the tumour to keep it alive, in some cancers they can be localised to one place but in other cases the cells and shoot off to other parts of the body and start growing the tumours elsewhere.

That’s a pretty simplistic way of explaining it, and it does get a bit more complex with some cancers but it’s not a disease like catching a virus, it’s something going fundamentally wrong in the cells then the normal mechanisms for dealing with those things fail.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Chemotherapy is designed to weaken the whole body and attack all cells in the hope it kills of the relatively fragile and faulty cancer cells, the issue with that is all cells get attacked.

Radiotherapy is more targeting, it attaches the tumour more directly killing the cells with radiation unfortunately it tends to damage any cells the radiation beam passes through.

There is proton beam therapy, a lot like chemotherapy but you have more control over the depth and scattering of the radiation.

There are new therapies which program the body’s immune system to see the cancer cells as and invader and so the immune system starts to attack the cancer,
These actually work really well on advanced cancers but they can’t always be used.

There are a number of other experimental treatments as well generally though if you are making a medication specifically to target only one person’s cancer then these treatments are stupidly expensive sometimes in the £1000’s per dose.

If the cancer has spread (metastasised) then it is much harder to treat because it is all over the body, a bit like a car being “riddled” with rust, unfortunately with cancer it tends to attack important organs like the liver lungs brain and bones which you can’t just cut out or zap with radiation, that’s when it often becomes to advanced to treat and people eventually die as the cancer consumes the body’s resources for itself or damages the organs to the extent they stop working

 

[The Panda Nut]

As Ben said there was someone trying to turn this into a horrible racist argument, I tried to discuss this with him, but it was apparent that the whole thread was being spoilt and railroaded into some pretty awful comments on the part of this other person so I reported it asking if the whole thread could be cleaned up returning it to the well meaning thread it had been to start with. including deleting the posts I had made.

My thanks to those involved in the clean up as well. We dont need racism anywhere in life and should stand against it.

 

[vexorg]

Interesting, still cant fully get my head round it, or why the experts in the field cant solve it.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

why the experts in the field cant solve it.

one cancer cell can be 1000th of a mm across, and there can be millions of them making up a tumour, they are in essence genetically the same as your own cells making it difficult to kill tumour cells but not kill off healthy cells. The whole idea of chemotherapy is that you target the cells you want to kill of and hope you don't kill off too many of the healthy ones in the process. Same with radiotherapy.

If you perform surgery to cut out a cancer, you take what is called margin around the tumour to hopefully be sure to get all the cancer cells. but if the cancer has spread, say from the bowel, to the live lungs brain and bones, you can't cut out all those tumours, you can't always get the drugs to the tumours without risking damaging the organs beyond repair, you don't want to say save someones life by bombarding their brain with radiotherapy but leave them a vegetable. and you can't cut out bone as it doesn't regrow. so sometimes there just comes a point where there isn't a lot more you can do to stop the spread or growth of the cancer. Cancer cells also tend to have a very high metabolism which takes all the food and nutrients the rest of the body needs which is why cancer patients tend to end up very thing and emaciated.

There is a lot we can do now, but you can't always fix everything which is why getting help as soon as possible is essential.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the worsts because you cannot cut out someone's pancreas they won't survive without it. It is extremely hard to treat and has a very high incidence of reoccurrence. I forget the exact figures but survival to 5 years with pancreatic cancer is in the single digits. only a few people survive beyond 5 years.

Steve Jobs from Apple had pancreatic cancer and even with all his money and rumors he had a dodgy underground pancreas transplant, he still died as a result very young.

 

[vexorg]

Putting the human/emotional part aside, it's more the engineering side I try to understand and workout, and know what's going on.
I know a few people to have had cancer, but there are questions that you just dont ask (I've been told). If it was me then I'd want to know every detail of what's happened and what's going on.

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

I get the P word now!

Having a 16 year old son means i get to hear some other corrupted words, did you know the word "sick" now means "great". So if i were to say my Grande Punto was sick, that'd mean it was great. Not a pain the in neck always needing repairs lol

Another one is the word "dope" also meaning "great". So if i were to say the speakers on my Grande Punto were dope, that'd mean they were great. Not the speakers having dope hidden behind them lol

I got a free bowel cancer test when i turned 50, and buy extras off Amazon every year or two.

Bit late commenting here but "Dope" to me means some sort of illicit drug?

 

[AnthonyH]

Bit late commenting here but "Dope" to me means some sort of illicit drug?

It is marijuana.

I see Chris Hoy in the news regularly at the moment, he's promoting awareness, so doing good and he'll save lives. He'll have a good legacy, the cycling and helping others.

I remember many years ago Roy Castle died of lung cancer and spent his final years on the anti smoking message. He still has a charity and shops in his name.

Edit: I just looked up Roy Castle and he died in 1994. It seems like only yesterday to me. His widow did a BBC interview a couple of months ago.

Roy Castle's 'phenomenal legacy' 30 years on from his death

The entertainer and TV presenter spent the final years of his life raising awareness of lung cancer.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

It is marijuana.

I see Chris Hoy in the news regularly at the moment, he's promoting awareness, so doing good and he'll save lives. He'll have a good legacy, the cycling and helping others.

I remember many years ago Roy Castle died of lung cancer and spent his final years on the anti smoking message. He still has a charity and shops in his name.

Edit: I just looked up Roy Castle and he died in 1994. It seems like only yesterday to me. His widow did a BBC interview a couple of months ago.

Roy Castle's 'phenomenal legacy' 30 years on from his death

The entertainer and TV presenter spent the final years of his life raising awareness of lung cancer.

www.bbc.co.uk

Yes, Roy Castle was quite a bloke. Nothing but admiration for folk like him and Chris. I wonder where they find the strength to do what they do - I don't think I'd be strong enough to be so positive if I was in their position.

 

[AnthonyH]

I can be positive even in dire circumstances, but not always. Chris Hoy is 48, so younger than me, Roy Castle was 62 when he passed.

My knee has improved and i took out a gym membership a couple of days ago. I've been able to run at the gym but the knee is a bit achey now, so i'll rest it for a couple of days. How is your physio going?

 

[Pugglt Auld Jock]

I can be positive even in dire circumstances, but not always. Chris Hoy is 48, so younger than me, Roy Castle was 62 when he passed.

My knee has improved and i took out a gym membership a couple of days ago. I've been able to run at the gym but the knee is a bit achey now, so i'll rest it for a couple of days. How is your physio going?

Physio going exceptionally well thank you. In fact he told me on Wednesday that my recovery is the best he's yet seen for a replacement hip and then went on to warn me quite seriously not to overdo it and perhaps tear some muscle tissue which hasn't completely mended yet. I'm moving around the house and climbing the stairs without sticks now but I do take just one with me when I'm out for my daily walkabout. Biggest thing was last night, which was the first in a month, when I didn't have to self inject with the "stingy" anticoagulant! I'm now hopeful that I'll be fit to drive again after week 6 when I have my "sign off" final appointment with the consultant.