When my dad died, he looked like a prisoner in a concentration camp. He was fighting melanoma, however, not starvation. And people were trying to help him, not to kill him.

At the end, though, he had the same sunken eyes and scraggly beard; paper-thin skin barely stretching over bone. Except for his left arm, which swelled up grossly with fluid, you could see his skeleton through his skin. The tumors infesting his intestines and liver starved him to death in a matter of weeks.

I had this recurring dream for almost a year after my dad died (until I quit drinking). In this dream, my dad looked just like he had on his deathbed. His jaw would hang open, a black hole. He would stretch out his skeletal arms at me and rush toward me and scream. It was the sort of dream that you can understand driving one to drink.

It’s hard for me to take movies and TV shows with characters “dying of cancer” seriously. They never give the makeup artist a big enough budget to make it look realistic, or they don’t want to upset a celebrity by making them look as gruesome as truthfulness calls for.

Cancer can be a harsh way to go, and the worst of it for loved ones isn’t witnessing the physical effects of the disease. It’s the sense of helplessness. At a certain point in the tumor’s long march, there is nothing left to do but pray — and feed your father ice chips.

I was thinking about Dad when President Trump and his National Institutes of Health started taking a weed whacker to biomedical research this spring, cutting billions of dollars worth of funding. Quite a few of those grants had to do with cancer. Among them were $2 million from the Cancer Support Center and $750,000 rescinded from a study on automated digital imaging for cervical cancer screenings, both at Columbia University, which the president has personal beef with.

Many others specifically had to do with addressing cancer screenings and treatment in minority communities, both racial minorities and gender/sexual minorities. More proof for my previous thesis that President Trump and his administration is trying to kill off my people.

Also targeted were grants that would affect everyone: studies on how to prevent cancer misinformation (i.e., the people who tell you if you drink enough pomegranate juice you can cure your cancer).

Then there was $1.6 million taken away from a Stanford study on “Determining and targeting mechanisms controlling cancer cell division.” (For those not in the know, the uncontrollable division of cancer cells is what causes tumors, and eventually kills you.) Also, $600,000 was revoked from the University of Washington for understanding the role of TP53 mutation in genetic susceptibility to ovarian cancer.

There were also other studies that personally could have benefited me that had their funding canceled, including $218,000 to the University of Virginia for studying “Neurodevelopmental Biomarkers of Late Diagnosis in Female and Gender Diverse Autism.” (That would have been cool if I could have gotten a blood test or a scan for autism instead of having to pay $1,200 out of pocket for a neuropsych evaluation!).

Also revoked was $550,000 from the University of California for “Uptake, Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines during Pregnancy.” (It would be nice to have more information on this, since I am literally pregnant right now).

Another $1.9 million was earmarked to study “Immunological, Epigenetic and Developmental Determinants of Early Pregnancy Success.” Translation: learning more about what causes infertility, which plagues a huge number of families and which we as a society don’t know all that much about.

The grant massacre has been temporarily paused by the courts as lawsuits unfold, although given the fact that NIH officials told the New York Times they were “continuing to categorize medical research grants based on whether they included topics disfavored by the Trump administration, even if they were not terminating those grants” doesn’t reassure me that the government has changed its mind about stopping this medical research.

There are many options for them to do so other than cancelling grants — slow-walking awards, making paperwork as difficult as possible, inducing staff to quit through unfair treatment. Not to mention all the scientists, doctors and researchers who will have to abandon their research and positions in order to, you know, get a job that gives them a reliable paycheck.

The brain drain from this uncertainty alone, even if all the grant money was returned in full tomorrow, will damage America’s medical research for years, if not generations.

The American Association of Medical Colleges analyzed the available data and has found that the terminated NIH grants amount to $3.8 billion. The AAMC was gracious enough to break it down by state; Maine has lost $22.5 million.

Now I admit those are big numbers. Sometimes in budgets, tough choices must be made. But President Trump has never done anything tough in his life and his administration follows in his footsteps. His “big, beautiful bill” budget that was recently passed into law will add almost $4 trillion to the national debt. That’s trillion with a “t” as in “tremendous.” I did not make a typo. So obviously our country has money to spend.

You know what we’re spending it on instead of curing cancer, Alzheimer’s and addiction? Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has been given $75 billion to put on masks, snatch grandmas and grad students and ship them to a compound in Florida.

With this budget, ICE has a larger budget than the U.S. Marines. It will be the biggest law enforcement agency in American history; it will have more cash than the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons combined.

And yet we can’t afford $3.8 billion of medical research? Don’t make me laugh. Even the most cherry-picked Fox News statistic can’t make it look like immigrants are more of a threat to Americans than literal cancer.