1 Year Cancer Free Quotes

I like storms. Thunder torrential rain, puddles, wet shoes. When the clouds roll in, I get filled with this giddy expectation. Everything is more beautiful in the rain. Don't ask me why. But it’s like this whole other realm of opportunity. I used to feel like a superhero, riding my bike over the dangerously slick roads, or maybe an Olympic athlete enduring rough trials to make it to the finish line. On sunny days, as a girl, I could still wake up to that thrilled feeling. You made me giddy with expectation, just like a symphonic rainstorm. You were a tempest in the sun, the thunder in a boring, cloudless sky. I remember I’d shovel in my breakfast as fast as I could, so I could go knock on your door. We’d play all day, only coming back for food and sleep. We played hide and seek, you’d push me on the swing, or we’d climb trees. Being your sidekick gave me a sense of home again. You see, when I was ten, my mom died. She had cancer, and I lost her before I really knew her. My world felt so insecure, and I was scared. You were the person that turned things right again. With you, I became courageous and free. It was like the part of me that died with my mom came back when I met you, and I didn’t hurt if I knew I had you. Then one day, out of the blue, I lost you, too. The hurt returned, and I felt sick when I saw you hating me. My rainstorm was gone, and you became cruel. There was no explanation. You were just gone. And my heart was ripped open. I missed you. I missed my mom. What was worse than losing you, was when you started to hurt me. Your words and actions made me hate coming to school. They made me uncomfortable in my own home. Everything still hurts, but I know none of it is my fault. There are a lot of words that I could use to describe you, but the only one that includes sad, angry, miserable, and pitiful is “coward.” I a year, I’ll be gone, and you’ll be nothing but some washout whose height of existence was in high school. You were my tempest, my thunder cloud, my tree in the downpour. I loved all those things, and I loved you. But now? You’re a fucking drought. I thought that all the assholes drove German cars, but it turns out that pricks in Mustangs can still leave scars.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

I like storms. Thunder, torrential rain, puddles, wet shoes. When the clouds roll in, I get filled with this giddy expectation. Everything is more beautiful in the rain. Don't ask me why. But it’s like this whole other realm of opportunity. I used to feel like a superhero, riding my bike over the dangerously slick roads, or maybe an Olympic athlete enduring rough trials to make it to the finish line. On sunny days, as a girl, I could still wake up to that thrilled feeling. You made me giddy with expectation, just like a symphonic rainstorm. You were a tempest in the sun, the thunder in a boring, cloudless sky. I remember I’d shovel in my breakfast as fast as I could, so I could go knock on your door. We’d play all day, only coming back for food and sleep. We played hide and seek, you’d push me on the swing, or we’d climb trees. Being your sidekick gave me a sense of home again. You see, when I was ten, my mom died. She had cancer, and I lost her before I really knew her. My world felt so insecure, and I was scared. You were the person that turned things right again. With you, I became courageous and free. It was like the part of me that died with my mom came back when I met you, and I didn’t hurt if I knew I had you. Then one day, out of the blue, I lost you, too. The hurt returned, and I felt sick when I saw you hating me. My rainstorm was gone, and you became cruel. There was no explanation. You were just gone. And my heart was ripped open. I missed you. I missed my mom. What was worse than losing you, was when you started to hurt me. Your words and actions made me hate coming to school. They made me uncomfortable in my own home. Everything still hurts, but I know none of it is my fault. There are a lot of words that I could use to describe you, but the only one that includes sad, angry, miserable, and pitiful is “coward.” I a year, I’ll be gone, and you’ll be nothing but some washout whose height of existence was in high school. You were my tempest, my thunder cloud, my tree in the downpour. I loved all those things, and I loved you. But now? You’re a fucking drought.

of biochemical failure when he’s actually cancer-free. Finally, there’s the phenomenon of PSA “bounce”—and this, too, can confound results under the ASTRO definition. While PSA declines after radiation, men who are ultimately headed for a healthy, low, stable PSA level may see it suddenly go up. Think of it as PSA’s last fling. This bounce is transient and has been studied using a variety of different definitions. It is generally described as a sudden rise of at least 0.1 to 0.5 ng/ml, followed by a decrease. This usually occurs within the first two years after treatment, and may happen in as many as 40 percent of men after either external-beam radiation or brachytherapy. In most studies, it seems more likely to occur in younger men. The

1. GROWTH HORMONES IN MEAT When you eat conventional meat, you’re probably eating hormones, antibiotics, steroids, and chemicals created by the fear and stress suffered by the animal during slaughter and in its inhumane living conditions. In 2009, two Japanese researchers published a startling study in Annals of Oncology. They pointed out that there has been a surge in hormone-dependent cancers that roughly parallels the surge of beef consumption in Japan. Over the last twenty-five years, hormone-dependent cancers such as breast, ovarian, endometrial, and prostate cancer rose fivefold in that country. More than 25 percent of the beef imported to Japan comes from the United States, where livestock growers regularly use the growth hormonal steroid estradiol. The researchers found that US beef had much higher levels of estrogen than Japanese beef because of the added hormones. This finding led them to conclude that eating a lot of estrogen-rich beef could be the reason for the rising incidence of these life-threatening cancers. Injected hormones like estrogen mimic the activity of our natural hormones and prevent those hormones from doing their jobs. This situation creates chaos. Growth hormones may alter the way in which natural hormones are produced, eliminated, or metabolized. And guess what? Hormone impersonators can trigger unnatural cell growth that may develop into cancer. The United States is one of the only industrialized countries that still allows their animals to be injected with growth hormone. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and the entire European Union have banned rBGH and rBST because of their dangerous impact on human and bovine health. US farmers fatten up their livestock by injecting them with estrogen-based hormones, which can migrate from the meat we eat to our bodies—and possibly stimulate the growth of human breast cancer, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, an organization committed to preventing breast cancer by

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.

Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision enough to see that the world was pooped out. Our Western world! - When I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies. Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration. Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will - but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing.

The results of the EPA study of passive smoking were not nearly as strong as the results of the much larger number of earlier studies of active smoking. Even though the risk of contracting lung cancer seemed to correlate well with the amount of exposure—how heavily the male companion smoked—the disease rates among women exposed to ETS averaged only 1.19 times higher than among women who lived with non-smokers. Furthermore, this modest test statistic was based on just thirty studies, of which six showed no effect from ETS. Since many of those studies covered small samples, only nine of them were statistically significant.24 None of the eleven studies conducted in the United States met that criterion, but seven of those studies covered fewer than forty-five cases.25 In the end, admitting that “EPA has never claimed that minimal exposure to secondhand smoke poses a huge individual cancer risk,”26 the agency estimated that “approximately 3,000 American nonsmokers die each year from lung cancer caused by secondhand smoke.”27 That conclusion prompted Congress to pass the Smoke-Free Environment Act, with its numerous regulations on public facilities.