Browsing my Facebook page the other day, I saw a little notice someone had posted. It was a fairly standard, please-pray-for-such-and-such-who’s-been-hospitalized request… at least, it was until I got to the part where the woman asking made the statement that her dad “had issues” with his prostate a couple of years back, and instead of having medical treatment, he “left it in God’s hands”.

To that I say–FUCK OFF. You may think me harsh, but there is no chance on God’s green earth I’m going to waste my breath/God’s time praying for someone who didn’t have the common sense to address their medical issues AT LEAST 2 years ago when they presented themselves. Everyone can miss things about their own health; don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating extreme hypochondria and life in the doctor’s office; but for his daughter to know that his trouble was linked to his prostate indicates that he *did* go see a doctor, he *did* get some sort of diagnosis and/or treatment plan, and then, he just chose to ignore it.

Fuck you. If you, living in a “1st world” country, want to die of a complex-yet-treatable, virtually curable disease, while millions of people in developing countries are slowly dying of malnutrition and unsafe drinking water and diarrhoea for fuck sake, then I fucking hope you do so.

To be perfectly blunt, I don’t give a good goddamn that you have blood in your urine, and a BP high enough to cause a stroke, and a mass in your bladder. Do you wanna guess what that mass is? My money’s on cancer! Congratulations, genius–by “leaving your health in God’s hands” you have effectively killed yourself! Do you feel better, now? Do you feel that you, and not some meddling doctor, got to make all the decisions about your (lack of) treatment? Do you feel good and pious? Are you pleased that your wife and daughter are going to spend the next months or years EITHER giving you spongebaths, and wheeling you around when you get to weak to walk, and slipping oral narcotics under your tongue as you grunt and writhe in pain, OR mourning you and blaming God for your death and depressing the shit out of everyone around them as they relentlessly pine for you? Are you glad your grandkids won’t really remember you, in 10 years time? Does all of that make you happy?

If not–then WHY THE FUCK DID YOU DO IT?

At the risk of boring my potential audience, I’m going to repeat again–I will not be wasting my prayers on this man. I *do* believe in the power of prayer, positive thinking, good vibes, whatever you want to call it, so I *will* pray for his family (mostly that they’re not emotionally destroyed by his stupidity and carelessness and lack of respect for his own life/the lives of his loved ones). I’ll pray that they come through this alright, and since they’re fundamentalist Christians, I’ll pray for God to send his Holy Spirit to comfort them, and to be with them in their time of loss; and I’ll mean every word. Even if my beliefs don’t match up with someone else’s, I can hope that their beliefs are right enough to provide them with some help and comfort; and I will give as much of those things as I can, which includes leaving a post on a Facebook Wall saying, “I’ll be praying; good luck”. I *will* pray. I *do* wish his family luck.

However, I will leave the man in question out of my heaven-bound petitions, because if I say one fucking sentence about him, it’ll probably be a request for God to just fucking kill him now and spare his family the hassle of looking after his selfish, narcissistic ass.