I fully expect to be diagnosed with cancer.  Soon.  Just so you know: if I do this may become a cancer blog.  Fair warning.

Not only have both my parents battled cancer, but when I went back to Indiana to look after my dad when he was dying of it, I remember finding some papers in his desk pertaining to contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, the military base where I was born and spent the first months of my life, during the period my family was there. 

According to a recent AP report, the drinking water was "contaminated by fuel and cleaning solvents from the 1950s through the 1980s, and health officials believe as many as 1 million people may have been exposed to the toxins before the wells that supplied the tainted water were closed two decades ago." 

What are the odds that I would be one of them?  I feel like a sweepstakes winner.

Now it's hitting the news again, because of newly discovered records that "show that a water well contaminated by leaking fuel was left functioning for at least five months after a sampling discovered it was tainted with benzene in 1984," the year of my birth.* 

The records indicate the military knew a lot of specifics.

For years the Marine Corps knew the fuel farm, built in 1941, was leaking 1,500 gallons a month and did nothing to stop it, according to a 1988 memo from a Camp Lejeune lawyer to the base's assistant facilities manager. "It's an indefensible waste of money and a continuing potential threat to human health and the environment," wrote Staff Judge Advocate A.P. Tokarz.

Minutes of a 1996 meeting with Moon Township, Pa.-based Baker Corp., the third contractor, indicate the fuel farm had lost 800,000 gallons of fuel, of which 500,000 gallons had been recovered. Benzene was "in the deeper portion of the aquifer" and the "fuel farm is definitely the source," the minutes quote a Michael Baker employee as saying.

The Coast Guard categorizes any coastal oil spill larger than 100,000 gallons as major.

(My father's death, by the way, was ruled service-related by the Marine Corps.)

After a single year in which I lost my dad to cancer and my mother was diagnosed, I had been living with the daily reality of it so intensively that when I came back to Boston to resume some kind of "normal" life, I couldn't get it out of my head.  I went to my doctor and had her examine every mole, every lump, every inch of me for signs of cancer.  Because I was sure I had it somewhere.

Nothing. 

Then I got tonsillitis and the Ear, Nose and Throat doctor peered down my throat and found an asymmetrically enlarged tonsil, which can be a sign of squamous cell carcinoma or lymphoma.  I was sure that was it.  All the tests turned up clean.

My friend who recently lost her husband after a long battle with cancer is going through the same thing — even more intensely — right now.  I don't think it's so unusual.  Cancer as metaphor (to borrow from Susan Sontag, with whom I'm having a lot of amazing brain sex these days) is incredibly potent. A survivor's certainty that he or she has cancer seems a natural reaction to the trauma of losing a loved one to it.

It's been over five years since I went through it with my family, and I've calmed down quite a bit.  But if anything, the frantic search for signs of cancer has given way to a slow-burning certainty.  It's coming.  I can almost feel it.
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*Just checking to see if you're paying attention ;-)