I’ve mentioned my grandmother a few times, but I want to write about her more directly,
because she’s honestly the reason I care about any of this.

She passed away from pancreatic cancer, which came after years of smoking. When it
happened, I thought of it as a medical tragedy, something that just happened to her. But
the more I’ve learned, the more I see it as a public health story too, not just a personal
one.

Smoking isn’t a small risk factor. According to the CDC, tobacco use is the leading
preventable cause of cancer and cancer deaths, and it’s linked to a long list of cancers,
including pancreatic cancer. The CDC says each year hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. die from a cancer related to tobacco use. The key word there, again, is preventable.

That’s the hard part for me. My grandmother’s cancer wasn’t just bad luck. It was
connected to something that, on a population level, we actually know how to reduce.
Things like tobacco taxes, smoke-free public spaces, education campaigns, and
programs to help people quit have all been shown to lower smoking rates. The CDC
even mentions that more than a million tobacco-related cancer deaths have been
avoided since 1990 because of prevention and control efforts.

So when I think about my grandmother, I don’t just think about the treatment she got at
the end. I think about all the years before, where prevention could have made a
difference. Addiction is real and quitting is genuinely hard, and I’m not blaming her at all.
If anything, it makes me want to focus on the systems that make it easier for people to
never start, or to quit before it’s too late.

This is where “health before healthcare” became personal for me. By the time cancer is
diagnosed, you’re already in the hardest fight. I’d rather spend my life working on
everything that comes before that.

This post deals with cancer and a personal loss, which can be heavy topics.

Article I read: Cancer and Tobacco Use — CDC Vital Signs