I've helped many, many, many children, thousands of children, cancer kids, leukemia kids.
While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.
What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body!
Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.
Being a spokesperson for cancer awareness has been a passion of mine. It helps me in my recovery but also helps others.
When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.
This experience has also humbled me by giving me a true understanding of what millions of others face each day in their own fight against cancer.
When I was 41, I found a lump the size of a grape in my right breast. I ended up bald, sick and exhausted from surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments. Ah, but I got to live.
Two days prior to the Herrick operation I repaired a double cleft lip, resected a recurrent cancer of the mouth, corrected lop ears in a child, and closed a burn of the buttocks.
I was diagnosed with lupus, and I've been through chemotherapy.
I started stem cells when I wanted to find a cure for my mother, who I loved very much, and western medicine was not able to cure her. If I had discovered stem cells a year before, I think that she would still be here with me.
Two days after the chemo I felt terrible, like I had a permanent migraine and had been shot in every limb. I was knackered, starving. The doctor explained that was because I had essentially been poisoned.
What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.
I did grieve a bit when I wasn't having the chemo anymore. I was used to sitting in the little chair and then the nurse would come and do it. It was like that was your job for that long and it was reassuring.
Cancer treatment is very expensive, and the process is painful and long. This is something that we have to collectively think about, on how to make it affordable.
New drugs and surgical techniques offer promise in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's, tuberculosis, AIDS, and a host of other life-threatening diseases. Animal research has been, and continues to be, fundamental to advancements in medicine.
Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.
One thing you have to realize is that cancer is not something you necessarily cure, but you want to just take care of yourself and extend your life as long as you can.
My dad has had a rare form of leukemia since I was in about 7th grade. But they've come up with some amazing drugs since then and he's doing really well today.
More people live off cancer than die from it.
"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)
If I missed a game, that meant I was losing the battle. I'm not going to let leukemia affect me.
If I were a 40-year-old woman, 40-to-50, I'd want to be getting my mammograms. They catch cancers, and cancer is very curable if you catch it early.
I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.
