I raised my child in a shopping mall. Not the kind of my youth: An enclosed, 1980’s dark-floored cave with a Spencer’s and The Limited, Orange Julius, and Chick-Fil-A; a constant fountain whooooooshing in the background. No, this shopping mall is a modern, outdoor arrangement with a small fountain in which people throw pennies along with doomed and prophetic wishes. It has every conceivable type of food, a bookstore, Best Buy, Chuck E. Cheese, and more boutiques and large brand names than anyone could ever shop in a day. This all occurs to me as my now-19-year-old daughter, Isabel, gets ready to graduate from college. She was raised in a shopping…
-
-
Watch your child for addiction; it can cause cancer
This is one cancer story that no parent would like to hear about but for Dr Raj Nagarkar, managing director and surgical oncologist at HCG Manavata Cancer Centre, Nashik, it has been an eye-opener on how deadly tobacco consumption can be. A ten-year-old boy from Nashik, who picked up the habit of consuming tobacco from his father’s leftover gutka packets, developed cancer after a month of use and died within four years of diagnosis despite best efforts. Dr Nagarkar, who has performed more than 45,000 cancer surgeries in the last 20 years and operates on at least 250 cancer patients every month, was aghast when a cancer survivor (a woman…
