Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.
Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.
I have heard of people dying from prostate cancer, and they are the unlucky ones, the people who didn't know they had got it, and it went on the rampage.
The disease I have is quite a rare cancer, and it is located in a limited area - a very widespread area, but narrow. So a lot can happen if the cancer starts getting really aggressive, pressing on parts of the brain and causing me to lose either my speech or my ability to think, etc.
The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology.
Breast cancer is thought to use cholesterol to help the cancer migrate and invade more tissue.
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
A tumor often grows silently and doesn't start making itself known until it's pushing on structures or organs or tissues around it in a way that starts to mess up the whole system.
Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system.
Dad's cancer experience included periods of relatively good health as well as bouts of hospitalisation as he coursed his way through a variety of different chemotherapy treatments.
The thing with cancer is that it's usually the chemo rather than the disease itself that makes the patient feel so ill, particularly at the start.
Cancer cells have had so many other things go wrong with them, genetic, non-genetic changes, that those cells, one of the things they then get selected for is that they have lots of telomerase because now the telomeres in those cells get maintained.
Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in.
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.
My husband, Clay Felker, died 17 years after his first cancer due to secondary conditions that developed from treatment.
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.
When my sister was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, her doctor told her that the cancer had probably been in her system for 10 years. By the time cancer's diagnosed, it's usually been around for quite a while.
There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.
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.
Cancer is really a DNA disease... We have these certain genes that prevent our cells from growing out of control at the expense of the body. And it's a pretty good, robust system. But if a couple of these genes fail, then that's when cancer starts, and cells start growing out of control.
If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.
My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.
The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous.
'Early stages' is when the cancer is completely contained within the prostate. If it is detected when the cancer is entirely in the gland, the chance for full recovery is at its highest.
The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.
