The Unknown Killer:

The Unknown Killer:
Pulmonary Fibrosis
Robert A. Hall

It comes on us as silent as the night,
And steals a breath and then another breath,
Until it smothers out another life,
To claim a hundred lives with every day.

It still remains the killer hardly known,
That takes you softly by the throat at first,
And whence it comes no doctor yet can say,
Nor how to pry its grip from off your lungs.

And so we laugh and do the best we can
To live our lives as fully as we wish,
And hold them dearly even as they fade—
It makes the colors ever more intense.

We see the haunted looks of those we love,
And understand their helpless dread and fear,
If we are losing all, they’re losing us,
And there is naught that we or they can do.

But if our time is short, so is all life,
So still we take the gift of every dawn,
And each of us must thank the God we know,
For every breath and every day of life.

If we must cope with tanks and pills and cough,
And struggle for the very breath of life,
We want to leave our mark upon the hunt,
To kill this thing before it comes for you.

Permission granted to reprint this blank verse, iambic pentameter poem.

Pulmonary Fibrosis

Good video clip about the disease that I'm finding a challenge.

The Most Deadly Disease You've Probably Never Heard Of
http://www.kmir6.com/global/Category.asp?c=169134&topVideoCatNo=169134&autoStart=true&clipId=4931685

The clip says IPF kills as many people as breast cancer. The last research I read on the web estimated that breast cancer will kill 39,500 this year, while IPF will kill 42,000 to 45,000. But it's hard to pin down, so you can read different estimates in different places. Many people with IPF die of something related that is caused by the disease, such as congestive heart failure, and that goes on the death certificate, so the numbers actually killed by IPF are probably higher than reported.

Certainly breast cancer gets 10 or 20 times as many research dollars as IPF. Probably more.

On the plus side, I now get to use the handicapped parking spaces, so it's not all bad.