cancer

Love and laughter are stronger than cancer.

The "I love you"s are exchanged excessively under our roof. Cancer teaches you how important and critical that is.

I love you"s are exhanged excessively under our roof. Cancer teaches you how important and critical that is.

Science experiments have found that people who practice meditation release significantly lower doses of cortisol, known as the stress hormone. This is consequential because frequent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.

In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.

The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.

I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman's breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.

Diseases desperate grown,By desperate appliance are relieved,Or not at all.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that__ one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

Happiness is your inherent nature. In the hustle and bustle of life, you have forgotten a part of yourself, and looking for it outside. Fill this void with happiness that is sustainable, not transitory; that illuminates your life and that of others, that is life giving and so natural.

People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked.

Cancer, he__ said near the end, is the great equalizer. It doesn__ care who you are or what kind of salary you make. It doesn__ give one damn if you are a good person or a bad one. It is the ultimate villain because it__ not capable of mercy. It only knows how to destroy and that__ exactly what it does. Destroys everything.

Most injuries heal in time, but guilt is a cancer that knows where to hide.

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.

We Let the Boat DriftI set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.The water is utterly still. Here and therea black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope.Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept.My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox.Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddlesrested across our laps; glittering dropsfell randomly from their tips. The lightaround us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-let us get quite close before it dove, coming upafter a long time, and well away from humankind

Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one__ final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or __t__ O.K._ or ____ sorry_ or __ love you.__eople have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system__ expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what__ most important to them at the end of their lives.