To Heck With Cancer in Google Land

Last night I had occasion to purchase online two T-shirts that read "Fuck Cancer."

I'm entitled to buy them because I have/had/am having head and neck cancer.  Part of my throat was removed in April and then I underwent  six weeks of radiation therapy and infusions of cisplatin.

Aside from the pain and discomfort, which there is plenty of, I lost my sense of taste,  the desire to eat, some facial hair, some hair on the back of my head, and concluded with a strangely weak right arm, because surgery to remove a few dozen lymph nodes impinged on a nerve.

Also, the x-rays and chemotherapy were not beneficial to my salivary glands.

My taste and appetite returned, for the most part, my facial hair is trying to return, my arm is improving, and the back of my head may even be growing hair.  Saliva is back, most of the time.

(That is among the reasons I have not been blogging much lately).

So, I felt entitled to buy a Fuck Cancer T-shirt. 

I was not sure where I had seen them online, so I searched Google for "fuck cancer T-shirt."  But Google would not cooperate because the search is permanently set on "safe." Consequently, I turned up many anti-cancer T-shirts, but no fuck cancer.

If anyone has figured out how to turn off Google's safe search, please drop me a line. If one tries to turns if off, one is directed to "settings," which do not contain a way to turn off "safe" mode. The exercise has an infuriating circular character. 

My sense is that I could probably find all manners of hate, prejudice, violence, killing, crime. and other unsavory things on Google, no problem. Fuck cancer? Nope.

Google, for mysterious reasons, eventually "asked" me if I wanted to search for "fuck cancer T-shirts" and I responded positively. 

To sum up: I was not searching for pornography. Not every instance of a word such as "fuck" is necessarily immoral. Google's safety program cannot easily distinguish between the two.

Google eventually relented. I'm not sure why. 

But trust me. "Fuck cancer" is one of the milder feelings one has after a malignant chunk of throat is removed and then exposed to death rays and poison.