cancer

He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain.

Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann__ constant concern was, What if I have cancer?

Is that cancer curable or just treatable.

I've learned so much during my time with cancer. It's taught me a lot about who I am. It revealed to me my true goals and priorities. It introduced me to a brand new world where time isn't wasted, and important things aren't left unsaid. All the while, the superfluities of life are ignored and forgotten. Because I now understand how a person should act, whether confronted by death or not. And it's a shame that's what it takes to scare someone into becoming a conducive, meritable human being.

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live

Love and laughter are two of the most important universal cancer treatments on the planet. Overdose on them.

He was one of the few people who had spoken to me as though his words were not rocks and I was not glass.

Cancer is WAY too serious to be taken seriously all the time.

Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.

I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too.

Diverging results for types of dairy products and sources of calcium suggest that other components of dairy than fat and calcium may increase prostate cancer risk. Additional prospective studies are needed on types of dairy products and various sources of calcium in relation to risk of subtypes of prostate cancer and, in particular, advanced and fatal cancers.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

He put the x-ray up on the light screen: The tumor was a large white circle in the middle of the picture. It looked like a headlight coming straight at me, full-speed ahead.

Everyday is a good day, even when things are hard because we are still here, still fighting to live among the latter.

I was pissed that I couldn__ go out and celebrate like someone turning twenty-one typically would, so I wore black hair to show my family just how pissed off I was.

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?