Daniel Johns Quotes

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

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.

When the doctor told me I had cancer, I was scared.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

In 1962 I was diagnosed with this incurable disease.

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

I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.

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

'Incurable' is a tough word. So is 'terminal.'

You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

With Alexander's cancer, I was definitely brought to my knees for the first time because of the fear factor.

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

Cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumor or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties.

'Cancer' is such a frightening word.

Success is measured in months for me. When my health fails, it will fail quickly. Tumors grow on an exponential curve.

If your doctor tells you you have a rare disease that he or she has never seen, if you've got an incurable cancer, boy, don't accept that. You know, go and get a second opinion.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.