I wish that I knew the importance of having a regular mammogram, as early detection offers better treatment options and a better quality of life. I ignored the warning signs of the lump underneath my right arm when I discovered it in September 2006 and didn't seek medical attention until March 2007. By then, I was experiencing a late stage of breast cancer that forever changed my life.
The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?
(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity).
I was very surprised when last I bought a packet of cigarettes and had to request a refund as I read a warning that told me 'smoking can cause fatal lung cancer'.
Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me. ' Why not me? Why does tragedy always have to hit someone else?
Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself.
I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.
Then they told me about the call from home and that they were taking the threats seriously. I don't know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me. It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. My feeling was nobody can stop death; it doesn't matter if it comes from a Talib or cancer. So I should do whatever I want to do.
What's weird is when you meet a girl who is 23 and you are talking to her, even her voice is high-pitched, she's young. You ask her how old she is, she says, 'Twenty-three, how old are you?' and when I tell her I'm 41 it's like I've just told her I have cancer. It's, 'Oh my God, how long have you had that?'
Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which no longer provide us with food.
We may never understand illnesses such as cancer. In fact, we may never cure it. But an ounce of prevention is worth more than a million pounds of cure.
Having cancer does make you try to be better at everything you do and enjoy every moment. It changes you forever. But it can be a positive change.
Very few people would choose to have even the most fabled assortment of goods if it meant getting cancer within the year. But the choice involves not the certainty of cancer very soon but an increased probability of cancer at some time in the future. The cancers are no less real; millions will die painfully and prematurely because of what we do to our environment. But the choice is not an easily visualizable one, and our capacity of denial comes strongly into play - as it tends to whenever we must weigh future costs against immediate benefits.
I always tell people I'm grateful for my cancer diagnosis because it was the greatest gift because it completely changed my life. I was able to stop and let my whole life and world just crash over me like a wave. And I stood there and went, 'Wow. ' And for the first time, I stopped everything. I had to.
. . . in the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting
I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all.
Hate is a cancer that spreads one cell at a time.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
I continue to be amazed by our bodies' ability for self-repair. . . . Our bodies want to be healthy, if we would just let them. That's what these new research articles are showing: Even after years of beating yourself up with a horrible diet, your body can reverse the damage, open back up the arteries-even reverse the progression of some cancers. Amazing! So it's never too late to start exercising, never too late to stop smoking and never too late to start eating healthier.