cancer

Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or constraints of their neighbors... they are reproductive but not productive.

Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.

When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications.

Epigenetics doesn't change the genetic code, it changes how that's read. Perfectly normal genes can result in cancer or death. Vice-versa, in the right environment, mutant genes won't be expressed. Genes are equivalent to blueprints; epigenetics is the contractor. They change the assembly, the structure.

Evolution is ultimately why cancer is so deadly. Take two biopsies from different sides of a tumor, and they can be genetically very different, making it that much harder to fight. Variation is the toolbox of evolution, and this variation gives cancer strength.

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of cancer. I decided nobody should suffer that much.

The most famous rumor for me is that I had throat cancer. I never had throat cancer... I don't know why that started... The way I sing, probably.

Lance Armstrong, the famous cyclist and more importantly, cancer survivor, has said 'if you ever get a second chance for something, you've got to go all the way.'

Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive. Most of our lives it is easy but for the moments when it becomes difficult, when accident or sickness or sadness strikes, it's just about remembering one thing. You must simply survive.

I have a new found respect for women who have been through breast cancer and this surgery.

To other Canadians who are on journeys to defeat cancer and to live their lives, I say this: please don't be discouraged that my own journey hasn't gone as well as I had hoped. You must not lose your own hope.

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.

You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.

The only reason to have a positive mental attitude is that it makes life better. It doesn't cure cancer.

There's only one way to become an eagle, and that's to be born an eagle.

Everybody keeps talking about 'fighting' the cancer," he said, "everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and black blah blah blah.""Okay...and?""I'm not fighting," he said. "It's already inside me... and I'm not going to fight. I'm going to be a good host, let it pass through me.. resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.

The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.

Life is too precious to waste any of it regretting the past.