#FuckCancer

The last few weeks have been trying in my immediate circle with health scares and warnings, ranging from heart conditions to burn-outs and depression to erectile dysfunction to my own appointments and checkups regarding diabetes.

But the word that came back the most often this week was cancer.

One of my brother's best friends, in his early 20s, wrote this heart-wrenching piece - in French - about his current condition with leukemia, which in turn brought my immediate family back to memories of a painful past.

I also decided to bring my Twitter profile back to life - I went from having hundreds of followers to between 50 and 60, a figure that seems to change daily for some reason. No, Traci Lords is no longer following me. (insert sad face here). And I wasn't there a week that I learned more people I know were afflicted with cancer. Three people I know well were diagnosed in 2014, all in their thirties.

And that's in addition to Ottawa Senators general manager Bryan Murray's confession that he has Stage-4 colon cancer and whose only hope at this point is to extend his life, because it's too late to cure. He knows he won’t overcome his battle, but joked he wanted to prolong overtime, like during the famous 1980s game between the New York Islanders and Washington Capitals: ''Let’s go to extra overtime and keep playing, like the game we played against the Islanders many years ago, and we went to four overtime periods'', Murray said.

In the long run, no one survives Life. We are all just visiting and must make the most of what we have, try to find happiness and, ideally, try to help mankind evolve. And no one is immune from accidents, but seeing someone who knows his time is up, and trying to make the best of it while not dwelling on the fact that he's nearing the end really hits home. Hard.

And he becomes the second Senators hockey operations member to seemingly spend the end of his life as an actual member of the team in just about a decade, after Roger Nielsen in 2003.

33 Home-Made Popsicle Recipes

As a recent diabetic, I now have to eat less fruit than I used to, which means I cannot indulge in these fine examples of summer goodness - home-made popsicles!

Calorie Wise

Who can you trust when it comes to labeling the calorie content of food? Who makes sure the labels are accurate? What constitutes ''healthy'' food?

Here's a 5-minute, unscientific demonstration:

The Sugar Shack

We could only handle it for two and a half hours...

The Sugar Shack is a yearly Québec tradition, where you convene either family members or friends - or both if you're really courageous - to a far-out place no one can get to without a vehicle to go eat, essentially, breakfast at supper time drenched in maple syrup. And you conclude it with maple taffy - or sugar on snow, which is exactly what it sounds like, boiled maple syrup essence hardened when it collides with the cold from the snow. It is one case where eating the brown/yellow snow is actually encouraged.

These places are alike more and more - and they take on each other's defects rather than qualities, as evidenced by most of them no longer serving fucking bacon anymore. Eggs, ham, toast, cretons, marmelade, baked potatoes - all good. Fried, salted bacon fat (''oreilles de crisse''), too, yeah. But bacon? Oh-the-fuck-no!

I was even told ''Sugar Shacks don't serve bacon, why would they''? Then why the fuck do grocery stores sell maple-fucking-flavoured bacon, then, genius? Where did they get the fucking idea?

At $20 a pop, plus gas, plus the fact that you have to endure everybody else's fucking kids running around on sugar highs when you deliberately chose not to have any of your own with this precise moment in mind as to why, having no bacon is really not going to put you on my good side.

I don't eat eggs, I'd rather not eat ham but will here, entirely submerged in maple syrup; same goes for cocktail-sized hot dog sausages. Without bacon, basically, these are all things I'd rather avoid, at a ridiculous cost to boot.

What I do, basically, is fill up on cretons and test my blood-sugar's capacities to the extreme by over-indulging in maple, both in syrup form and taffy-on-snow, then I get sleepy at 7PM because my body's on the brink of shutting down from temporary diabetes. But I don't care. I won't let these fuckers take my twenty bucks without a fight. Although after an hour and a half of kids running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and screaming like a b-movie actress in a casting session for a Wes Craven flick, I was more than ready to raise the white flag.

That could have been the epilogue to my story, but it isn't.

This was organized by a friend-of-a-friend, a radio personality. 80 of her guests were there... 40 of whom got sick. Major gastroenteritis. I was fine but know many of the ill. Either I have the super-stomach of a rat and can digest anything, or it was in something I didn't eat (eggs), or ate very little of (ham, sausages). It sure wasn't the maple syrup, the bread or the cretons.

I know one thing for sure, though: we won't be going back to that hell-hole next year!

R.I.P. Patrice O'Neal

After suffering a stroke in October, stand-up comedian Patrice O'Neal died today, succombing to a long, hard struggle with diabetes.

I last saw him in The Comedy Central Roast Of Charlie Sheen, and he alluded briefly to his disease, but I didn't think it was that serious.

I need to get tested. Soon.

Did you know that in Canada, 25% of diabetics are unaware they even have it?