Tionne Watkins Quotes

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

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

In 1962 I was diagnosed with this incurable disease.

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

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

Like millions of others, I have been plagued by the devastating effects of cancer hitting not one, but multiple members of my family.

A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

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.

In medicine you go from dying to chronically ill. You don't go from dying to better than you ever knew you could be. That just doesn't happen.

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

The doctor said, 'He can't last a week.' And I did. And they said, 'There's no way this kid's going to last a month.' And I did. And so they said, 'Two years. He's not going to make it.' Two years. 'Five years. He can't do that.' I lived to be five years. 'He's never going to hit double digits.' And here I am, a new teenager.

My brain is good, but my body is deteriorating. I probably have another two or three years. Or I can pass tomorrow, but it doesn't make a difference to me.

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

Less than 1 percent of the patients treated are alive at the end of five years.

Too often you see someone fall, break a rib, go in to the doctor and discover a tumor.

Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.

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

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.

I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.