Anne Wojcicki Quotes

You hear the word 'cancer,' it scares you. You think of death.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

My parents never told me about Papa's lung cancer or the desperate nature of the operations he was about to undergo, which were a last-ditch effort to contain the spread of his cancer.

I have cancer. It's in my brain... What are you gonna do about it?

Doctors didn't know if I would survive. The cancer was too big to operate on, so they blitzed it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I'd scribble in the chart 'Widely metastatic disease - no role for surgery,' and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.

I had a cancer scare in the early '90s, and for a few months, I wondered if I would make it.

If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information.

It's a scary word, 'cancer.'

My father, Simon Hoggart, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2010. By this point, it had spread to his spleen and metastasised in his lungs and so was pronounced terminal.

Serious is when they tell you, 'You've got cancer.' Cancer is serious, but then the rest of it is not.

I'd never heard of colon cancer. Baseball wasn't even important to me. I have a wife and two girls. That's what was important. The doctors told me and all I could say was, 'When are we going to get this thing out?'

That was just kind of a surprise when the doctor said, 'We did a biopsy on your appendix, and you have cancer.'

Diagnosed incidentally with stage IV, grade 4 metastatic renal cell carcinoma, I had bone metastases in my femur (which eventually fractured), ulna, and cranium; five metastases in my lungs; and muscle metastases in my thigh and tongue. Yet six months after diagnosis, my treatment ended: I've not had a drop of anything since.

The word 'cancer' carries with it enormous fear, fear for the future, fear for family.

If you're unable to catch it in time, the cancer can spread to the lymph nodes and at that point, the cancer is essentially incurable, but that doesn't mean your condition can't be improved.

I am not prepared to explain to a sick child with cystic fibrosis, facing death and fighting for breath, the ethical grounds that hinder the science which could save him.

I had prostate cancer. It was rather painful and, in many ways, life-changing.

Where my cancer was, if it moves just a tiny bit... towards the area where there's no return, it stays, then there's no turning back.

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

I land in New York, and next day, we go to the doctor. He looks at everything, and we had sent all our tests, and he says, 'You know, it is fourth stage, and you have 30% chance of survival.'

When they told me I had cancer, I thought I was going to die.

I had just finished playing a doctor in Doctors' and I had had to tell somebody that they had cancer. In that moment I thought, He's doing what I did!' We sat down and he said, I'm sorry, Mr. Timothy, but I've got bad news.' I thought, Oh!' He told me that they had found cancerous cells, but not a lot.

When I was first diagnosed, I went out, as a book person, and got some books on cancer and looked up my version of the disease. It said that I had about a 5 percent chance of survival. I said, 'Gosh, well, it's been a good run.' What I didn't realize is that in the two years since those books were published, things had shifted dramatically.

Probably the toughest time in my life was - was standing there with Ann as we hugged each other and the diagnosis came. And I was afraid it was Lou Gehrig's disease. As we came into the doctor's office, the brochures on his table there were Lou Gehrig's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis.