Breast Cancer Sayings And Quotes

Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.

People take ownership of sickness and disease by saying things like MY high blood pressure MY diabetes, MY heart disease, MY depression, MY! MY! MY! Don't own it because it doesn't belong to you!

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

Mol, it's not probably nothing if they fucking want you to go to Germany." She winced, and he turned to the people-mostly women- who were filling most of those waiting room seat. "Excuse me. This doctor thinks my wife, whom I love more than life, has breast cancer, so I'm going to say fuck probably about ten more times. Is that okay with all of you?

You love him, don't you?" "That's an impossible question to answer." "No it isn't," she argued. "It's a simple yes or no. You either love someone or you don't." "I don't know. Maybe." "Renee, maybe is not an acceptable answer. That's like saying you're a little bit pregnant and or caught a touch of breast cancer. Deep down, you know whether or not you love someone.

People get old, get sick and die. Or they die suddenly. Or their deaths drag on forever. My friend Tory is dying a slow, excruciatingly painful death of bone cancer. Eight friends have died of breast cancer. Polar bears are dying. Honeybees are vanishing. The oceans are drying up. There is a part of me that wants my money back. That wants to say, 'I didn't sign up for this. I don't like the way this whole thing is set up and I won't participate in it.

So I guess it's okay with you if I smoke up too?" says Steven. "If you get breast cancer

I’m sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. “Perhaps,” the editor continued, “you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall.

A person who complains about any aspect of breast cancer treatment in public is often drowned out by a chorus of people, many of whom have never had cancer, accusing her of ingratitude, saying she is lucky, warning her that her bad attitude may kill her, reminding her she could be dead.

Hormonal changes permanently alter the breast's structure. And when a pregnancy is terminated through abortion, the process is interrupted, which leaves cells in a sate of transition. And they say cells in this state have a very high risk of becoming cancerous. So the woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life my be greatly increased.

To take estrogen or not to take estrogen: That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to abstain and suffer The sweat and puddles of outrageous flashes Or to take arms against a sea of mood swings, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; at first the studies say 'twill end The heart attacks and thousand bouts of bloat That flesh is heir to, 'tis a true confusion - For then they say 'twill cause us all to die Perchance from breast cancer; ay, there's the rub; For who can dream or even sleep while worrying about What doctors might be saying come next week?

That day was an education for me. I'll never forget it. Standing in teh doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the poewrful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself, [in italics] That's what I want to be when I grow up. and you know you've grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it. Norman called Ducky-Bob's party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable even, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili's team jammed into Norman's room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn't what his people to see him lying down, so I'd helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.

In one study, psychologists interviewed patients admitted to hospital for breast biopsy, without knowing the pathology results. Researchers were able to predict the presence of cancer in up to 94 per cent of cases judging by such psychological factors alone.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous" i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowning                         between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body                          into the river only to be left                          with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.                    Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green                    in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn                    mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you                    like a sparrow stunned with falling. i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed             with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks.             Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio.             Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver             to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs.             This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already             here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body             beside a body must ma

Poppy Devine did not deserve cancer. Poppy was sweet and industrious and careful and measured and always, always did the right thing. If anyone deserved cancer it was Julia. Julia was loud and opinionated and disagreeable. Rude, some might even say. She went out with bad men, took unnecessary risks, pushed people to their limits, swore like a sailor and flipped the bird more than any female in the history of the world. It should be her number coming up in the cancer lottery.

Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.

Yet the hunger to treat patients still drove Farber. And sitting in his basement laboratory in the summer of 1947, Farber had a single inspired idea: he chose, among all cancers, to focus his attention on one of its oddest and most hopeless variants—childhood leukemia. To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement. And despite its many idiosyncrasies, leukemia possessed a singularly attractive feature: it could be measured. Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. If cancer medicine was to be transformed into a rigorous science, then cancer would need to be counted somehow—measured in some reliable, reproducible way. In this, leukemia was different from nearly every other type of cancer. In a world before CT scans and MRIs, quantifying the change in size of an internal solid tumor in the lung or the breast was virtually impossible without surgery: you could not measure what you could not see. But leukemia, floating freely in the blood, could be measured as easily as blood cells—by drawing a sample of blood or bone marrow and looking at it under a microscope. If leukemia could be counted, Farber reasoned, then any intervention—a chemical sent circulating through the blood, say—could be evaluated for its potency in living patients. He could watch cells grow or die in the blood and use that to measure the success or failure of a drug. He could perform an “experiment” on cancer.

In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. “I’m sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. “Perhaps,” the editor continued, “you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall.” Rosenow

So should patients born under Libra and Gemini be deprived of treatment? You would say no, of course, and that would make you wiser than many in the medical profession: the CCSG trial found that aspirin was effective at preventing stroke and death in men, but not in women;30 as a result, women were undertreated for a decade, until further trials and overviews showed a benefit. That is just one of many subgroup analyses that have misled us in medicine, often incorrectly identifying subgroups of people who wouldn’t benefit from a treatment that was usually effective. So, for example, we thought the hormone-blocking drug tamoxifen was no good for treating breast cancer in women if they were younger than fifty (we were wrong). We thought clotbusting drugs were ineffective, or even harmful, when treating heart attacks in people who’d already had a heart attack (we were wrong). We thought drugs called ‘ACE inhibitors’ stopped reducing the death rate in heart failure patients if they were also on aspirin (we were wrong). Unusually, none of these findings was driven by financial avarice: they were driven by ambition, perhaps; excitement at new findings, certainly; ignorance of the risks of subgroup analysis; and, of course, chance.

I’m waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, I’m just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I don’t yet know how soon, and he’s also still a man with a cold. It’s a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he won’t be there for me to say it to him.

Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule. “I have one of those,” she said to the television set. “You had a mammogram?” She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.” I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?” “I didn’t do anything about it.” “What did the doctor say?” She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.” “So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening. “I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.” “I’ve been home three months.” But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was. Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—one of those daughters my mother—my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her.

What blocks black women from getting the cancer care available to white women? One barrier is that black women do not have the same access to mammography. Black neighborhoods have fewer facilities that provide breast cancer screening. The sole mammogram machine in Englewood, a predominantly black area on Chicago’s South Side, was broken for months. Women were sent ten miles away to get screened. Even the state-of-the-art John H. Stroger Hospital, which replaced Chicago’s aging Cook County Hospital in 2002 and serves many of the city’s poor African Americans, ran up a backlog of more than ten thousand women seeking mammograms.5 Mammograms cost about $150, which can be prohibitive for a woman struggling to feed her children. Medicaid paid only about half of the cost, so many hospitals in Chicago didn’t offer mammograms to women on Medicaid. “What does it mean if you have to take three buses to get to a place that gives mammograms, and then when you get there, you say, ‘Here is my Medicaid card,’ and they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t take that’?” Whitman asks.

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?

Emotions also directly modulate the immune system. Studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that natural killer (NK) cells, an important class of immune cells we have already met, are more active in breast cancer patients who are able to express anger, to adopt a fighting stance and who have more social support. NK cells mount an attack on malignant cells and are able to destroy them. These women had significantly less spread of their breast cancer, compared with those who exhibited a less assertive attitude or who had fewer nurturing social connections. The researchers found that emotional factors and social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of disease itself. Many studies, such as the one reported in The British Medical Journal article, fail to appreciate that stress is not only a question of external stimulus but also of individual response. It occurs in the real lives of real persons whose inborn temperament, life history, emotional patterns, physical and mental resources, and social and economic supports vary greatly. As already pointed out, there is no universal stressor. In most cases of breast cancer, the stresses are hidden and chronic. They stem from childhood experiences, early emotional programming and unconscious psychological coping styles. They accumulate over a lifetime to make someone susceptible to disease.

On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk. “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?” I shook my head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.” “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.” “Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.” “He means use a rubber.” “And take these.” My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills. “Gross,” was all I could say. “And your father has cancer,” my mother said. I said nothing. “Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.” “The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.

He shook his head at her question. Did women really think men cared about that stuff? Did he care if she did this all the time? Definitely, definitely not. He could honestly say he did not give a flying fuck whether this girl dragged guys home every other day to have her way with them for seven hours. He was just glad as hell she’d decided to do it with him. Today. And hopefully maybe again. Sometime.

In October, Dad’s mother, my Nanny, got very sick. She had been fighting breast cancer, and now it had gone into her lymph nodes. She had been a nurse, and she knew her hour was near. She wanted to go on her terms, and a wonderful hospice team came to her home. Nick came with me to see her one last time, and he was my rock. My father couldn’t bear to go into her room, but Nick came in with me. She was beautiful, so sick but still radiating the grace she brought to the demands of being a pastor’s wife. I realized that everything that was good in my life, I had because of her. Nanny had paid to press my first album. She was the reason I had a career at all and the reason I met Nick. I smoothed her hair back as I told her I was there. She squeezed my hand. “Nick is here, too, Nanny,” I whispered. “I want you to know we’re back together. I’m gonna marry him, Nanny. Just like you wanted.” She squeezed my hand again. “We’re going to have a beautiful wedding,” I said, “and you’ll always be with me. You’ll be right there.” She had asked to have my version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the last song off my second album, on repeat as she passed. As she took her last breath, surrounded by love and her family, my voice filled the room, saying, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” It’s a celebration of faith and gratitude that no matter how insignificant we may feel, God is looking out for us. At her funeral at First Baptist Church of Leander, Nick was a pallbearer and helped to carry her home. I will always be grateful to him for that. She was reunited in heaven with my late grandfather, to whom she had been married for forty-one years. I wanted that forever love for Nick and me, too.

In theory, high levels of chlorine in tap water could be bad for your gut microbes, but negligible amounts reach the microbes – unless you regularly drink from a swimming pool. Chlorine is not the only problem. Unless you buy pricey carbon filters and reverse osmosis machines, your tap water will still contain traces of common pharmaceutical drugs like ibuprofen, oestrogens, antibiotics, and antidepressants.5 Although levels are low these could have potentially minor cumulative effects: for example, affecting the way our genes function (epigenetics).6 This might seem like a good reason to switch to bottled water, but a survey in 2013 showed it was no better, and thirteen out of twenty bottle brands also had detectable levels of similar chemicals, including endocrine disruptor chemicals such as bisphenol (BPA).7 This chemical can have subtle effects on your genes and sex hormones and is now banned in many countries. BPA has been linked to low birth-weight babies and hormone-associated cancers of the breast, prostate and ovary.8 Manufacturers are responding to public fears by switching to BPA-free plastic, but EU and US regulators say the data is still inconclusive.9

THERMOGRAPHY Misinformation abounds as to the true nature of breast cancer and what causes it. With so much public focus on breast cancer awareness, very little attention is given to breast health, which we know is governed by things like clean eating, routine detoxification, energy balance, and stress reduction, among other things. These other things include not blasting radiation at the breasts in the form of mammograms, which only exacerbate breast cancer risk. Dr. Martin Bales, L.Ac., D.A.O.M., a licensed acupuncturist and certified thermologist at the Center for New Medicine in Irvine, California, has for years been administering one of the best-known alternatives to mammograms: thermograms. As its name suggests, thermography utilizes the power of infrared heat—hence the root word “therm”—to detect physiological abnormalities indicative of a possible breast cancer diagnosis. Dr. Bales’s father first pioneered the technology in the late 1970s with the development of the world’s first all-digital infrared camera, which was used for missile detection purposes during wartime. Its capacity to track the heat signature of missiles was applied to the field of medicine in the 1980s, which eventually gave way to thermographic medical devices. Dr. Bales opined during a recent interview: “In the early eighties, a group of doctors approached my father and said, ‘You know, we’ve heard the body—obviously with its (blood) circulation—we can diagnose a lot of diseases by seeing where there’s hot spots and where there’s cold.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll make a medical version for you.’” And the rest is history: thermography machines that identify hot spots in the breasts later hit the market, and select doctors and clinics offer it as a safe, side effect–free alternative to mammograms. “The most promising aspect of thermography is its ability to spot anomalies years before mammography,” says women’s health expert Christiane Northrup, M.D., about the merits of thermography. “With thermography as your regular screening tool, it’s likely that you would have the opportunity to make adjustments to your diet, beliefs, and lifestyle to transform your cells before they became cancerous. Talk about true prevention.

Emotions also directly modulate the immune system. Studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that natural killer (NK) cells, an important class of immune cells we have already met, are more active in breast cancer patients who are able to express anger, to adopt a fighting stance and who have more social support.

NK cells mount an attack on malignant cells and are able to destroy them. These women had significantly less spread of their breast cancer, compared with those who exhibited a less assertive attitude or who had fewer nurturing social connections. The researchers found that emotional factors and social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of disease itself.

They'd shake their heads and hug me too long and say, 'How. Are. You. Doing?' When I'd say, in all honesty, that I was fine, they'd look to the sky, nod their heads, and ask for the truth. Well, the truth was that I was doing great, until I saw their funereal fucking faces. Now, I felt like slapping someone.

And if you really can’t think of the right thing to say, send chocolate.

Instead, whenever I get home from the road, I cook. Nothing fancy. Comfort food: stews, shepherd’s pie, potato salad, red curry, roast chicken. Then I make chicken soup with the bones. Like, really good chicken soup. I eat some and freeze the rest. I deliver it to friends with new babies or head colds or deadlines or final exams or breast cancer. A fairly wide selection of East Vancouver residents owe me my Tupperware back. “Shut up and show up,” my grandma Pat once said to me after her neighbour’s husband died and she was making her a pot of macaroni and cheese. “That’s what your great-grandmother Monica used to say during the Depression.

Write down 3 – 5 things you are thankful for every night before going to bed. Say thank you. This can be to anyone you feel deserves it. A family member, doctor, friend, or stranger. Although being thankful is an act, gratitude is the feeling that will accompany it. Give a compliment. This is one of the most powerful ways of sharing love and happiness. Practice random acts of kindness. Pay for someone’s coffee, send someone flowers, mail a letter to someone special, the options are endless.

Seventh of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone Larry Levis living down in the flat part of Virginia draws his life In a Late Style of Fire his obituary doesn't say it but drugs killed him one way or another of course they don't print those sorts of things in papers didn't used to in poems neither where he wrote about jacking off sending meth for god to try he was teaching then at the same college we'd find you or you'd find yourself getting kicked out of for growing weed I wonder what Levis knew about Rome its firemen the most American things you ever heard of that never heard of America - When that great aunt died we included After a long battle with breast cancer in the draft of her obituary the paper took out breast too sexy for the news when you died nobody included how in the paper for the sake of decorum as if they were pulling something off as if people around here saw an obit for a 25-year-old no listed cause of death thought anything other than overdose or suicide the only folks fooled are those from the future the ones combing death records to find out how we lived the trouble with decorum the future won't know who did this to us who and how bad

Because what you just said is the sort of line that comes out of a Lifetime movie character after she discovers she has breast cancer,” Eleanor says.

a five-year study of more than two hundred women with breast cancer that aimed to determine whether a recurrence of cancer can be triggered by severe life events, such as divorce or the death of someone close.

Mothers not only pass the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on to their fetuses but on to even more distant generations. When a mother is exposed to EDCs, so too are her fetus's germ cells, which develop into eggs or sperm. "It's thought that during that exposure, the chemical can target those germ cells and do what we call reprogramming, or making epigenetic changes," says Flaws. "That can be a permanent change that gets carried through generations, because those germ cells will eventually be used to make the next generation, and those fetuses will have abnormal germ cells that would then go on to make the next generation." In the mid-20th century, scientists documented this in women who took a synthetic form of estrogen, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to prevent miscarriages.? The drug worked as intended, and the women gave birth to healthy babies. But once some of those children hit puberty, the girls developed vaginal and breast cancer. The boys developed testicular cancer, and some suffered abnormal development of the penis. Scientists called them DES daughters and sons. "When those DES daughters and sons had children, we now have DES granddaughters and grandsons, and a lot of them have increased risk of those same cancers and reproductive problems," says Flaws. "Even though it was their great-grandmother that took DES and they don't have any DES in their system-their germ cells have been reprogramming, and they're passing down some of these disease traits." And now toxicologists are gathering evidence that mothers are passing microplastics and nanoplastics complete with EDCs and other toxic substances- to their fetuses. In 2021, scientists announced that they'd found microplastics in human placentas for the first time, both on the fetal side and maternal side.Later that year, another team of researchers found the same, and they also tested meconium-a newborn's first feces and discovered microplastic there too. Children are consuming microplastics, then, before they're even born.

Garlic[43] : This amazing aromatic plant, the most powerful antioxidant known, has been used to treat and cure illnesses through the ages. Even Hippocrates recommended consuming large amounts of crushed garlic as a remedy. A study in China finds that consuming raw garlic regularly cuts the risk of lung cancer in half, and previous studies have suggested that it may also ward off other malignant tumors, such as colon cancer. It is best to let it sit for at least fifteen minutes after the pods have been crushed. This time is needed to release an enzyme (allicin) that produces antifungal and anti-cancer compounds. Alliates (garlic, onion, chives) and their cousins (leek, shallot) improve liver detoxification and therefore help protect our genes from mutations. I take it in three forms: tablet, powder and fresh. I use it in almost all my dishes and sauces, it is the anti-cancer food par excellence. Vegetables[44] : To avoid disease, nothing like a diet rich in raw and organic vegetables. The daily intake of vegetables would prevent cancers of the mouth, pharynx, esophagus, lung, stomach, breast, colon and rectum. I eat it abundantly; you could even say that it has become my staple food. I eat of course all the cabbage, garlic, onion, pepper but also asparagus, mushrooms, leek, cucumber, scallions (green onions), zucchini, celery, all salads, spinach, endives, pickles, radishes, green beans, parsley and aromatic herbs. At first, I ate cooked tomatoes but stopped because they contain too much sugar. Omega 3 :   Omega 3, in cancer, are anti-inflammatory. Omega 6 or linoleic acids (found in sunflower and peanut oils) are inflammatory. You must always have an omega 3 / omega 6 ratio favorable to omega 3. This is why I take capsules of this fatty acid in addition to eating sardines and anchovies[45]. An inflammatory environment is conducive to the formation and proliferation of cancer cells. To restore the balance, it is necessary to consume more foods rich in omega 3 such as fatty fish, rather small ones because of mercury pollution (sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring), organic eggs or eggs from hens fed with flax, chia seeds and flax seeds, avocados, almonds, olive oil. These good fatty acids help in the prevention of several cancers including breast, prostate, mouth and skin.

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.

When I was forty-three, I lost one of my best friends to breast cancer. One of the things I remember most is sitting on the little balcony off her kitchen with her one evening at sunset, looking out over the acres of land so she could see from there, the hills and winding roads and houses nestled into their lots as though settled on their mothers' laps. I remember her saying, "I just want to be here." Earlier that day, I'd sat at the kitchen table and listened while she spoke to someone on the phone, making her own arrangements for a burial plot. She told whomever she was speaking to her name, her address. When she gave her age, she said, "Well, I'm only forty-four. Which is really terrible.

There was a very interesting Australian study that looked at a number of women who had lumps suspicious for breast cancer, so they had to have biopsies. And they put these women through a psychological questionnaire before the results came back. And after the results came back, it turned out if a woman was emotionally isolated, that by itself did not increase the risk of that lump being cancerous. Similarly, if a woman was stressed, that by itself did not increase the risk of that lump being cancerous. But if a woman was stressed and emotionally isolated the risk of that lump being cancerous was nine times as great as the average. And the physicians and the scientists who did the study couldn't understand this because how do 0 and 0 add up to 9? But if, for example, you were stressed right now, which means there are high levels of stress hormones in your body, cortisol and adrenaline, but a friend of you next to you said "hey, how are you feeling? Do you want to talk about it?", the stresses would go right down. But if you are emotionally isolated and you are stressed then your cortisol level will stay high for a long time and cortisol suppresses the immune system, which means that malignancies are more likely to develop. Which means that cancer is not a disease of the individual. The development of cancer in the individual reflects a lifetime and history of relationships through family, culture and society. Which then might explain to us, for example, if you look at black Americans.. they are more likely to get prostrate cancer and more likely to die of it and not because of lack of medical care. And black women are more likely to die of breast cancer even if they have access to good medical care. Why is that? Well.. maybe there is something about being a minority in this particular culture, that it is so highly stressful, that it deranges the immune system. So is it an individual problem, again? Or is it a social problem? So what I'm saying is that you can't separate the mind from the body and you can't separate the individual from the environment. And the only way of looking at human beings is a bio-psycho-social view, which is to say that the biology can't be separated from the psychology and that can't be separated from the social environment.

Not only are there nearly three times more suicides than homicides each year, but suicide as a cause of medical mortality surpasses breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS. At least two thirds, some would say 90 percent, of suicides result from depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or one of the other categories of mental illness.

Without yoga, my breast cancer experience would have been much more difficult. The trust, courage and strength one develops through the practice of yoga will set anyone up to face life's most challenging experiences. I've heard folks say «Oh, I don't do yoga.» Give yoga a chance, and you will find that it's so much more than pretzel poses. Yoga is about finding your own balance in our crazy, tempestuous times. It's about standing tall with confidence even when the winds of your world are swirling around you.

My thoughts on breast cancer: I'm okay with it. A tumor makes a girl's boobs bigger. So fuck it. A great man once said "Never say never," and that man... Was Justin Bieber.

Tracy’s dead. I have to say the words to myself many times a day so I can begin to believe it. Knowing that death is coming does little to mitigate against the impact of its arrival.

All my book titles are prophetic because they were breathed by the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. What they say about salvation and peace is what will happen to any reader's life.

I can safely say that the origin of every single disease is genetic. Our genes are the code to everything in our bodies, good and bad. Without genes, there would be no cancer. Without genes, there would be no obesity, diabetes or heart disease. And without genes, there would be no life. This might explain why we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out which gene causes which disease and how we can silence the dangerous genes. This also explains why some perfectly healthy young women have had their breasts removed simply because they were found to carry genes that are linked to breast cancer. Much of this focus on genes, however, misses a simple but crucial point: not all genes are fully expressed all the time. If they aren't activated, or expressed, they remain biochemically dormant. Dormant genes do not have any effect on our health. This is obvious to most scientists, and many laypeople, but the significance of this idea is seldom understood. What happens to cause some genes to remain dormant, and others to express themselves? The answer: environment, especially diet. As we saw in chapter three, the genes that cause cancer were profoundly impacted by the consumption of protein. So while we can say that genes are crucial to every biological process, we have some very convincing evidence that gene expression is far more important, and gene expression is controlled by environment, especially nutrition.

I’d like to start a worldwide movement to implement practices of culturally appropriate Life Honoring Celebrations. Not to replace funerals but to augment them. Personally, I think it’s impractical at best and pointless at worst to sing somebody’s praises when they’re dead. Perhaps saying lovely things about them at funerals helps us mourn. Saying the same things to them while alive may give us a jumpstart on that mourning. But why not use their dying as an opportunity to grow ourselves, to bring us into closer proximity with the reality of death, to face our fears and step willfully into our deepest hearts to speak the truth of what someone means to us? Why not tell them when they’re alive? Why not let them see some of the difference they made in the world around them? Even the most troubled and maligned person usually has positively impacted somebody. No matter how difficult anyone’s life has been they usually create some ripples of positive change. And I believe that every person longs to know that. We long to see it. To know that our existence does not all come to naught in the end. That efforts large and small have impacts seen and unseen. It serves each of us to have tangible proof of this before we pass. Life Honoring Celebrations should be every human’s birthright. Thank goodness Tracy got to receive hers. Just in time.

But with complete assurance, I can say that after she was gone, a different strange and beautiful thing happened in a slow, inexorable way. It seemed wherever I looked around at the lives of others they too had lost their beloveds.

The story of the mustard seed from the Buddha’s life sprang to mind. A mother lost her young son. She came to the Buddha and pleaded with him to bring him back to life. Other versions of the story say she pleaded to be relieved of her suffering. In any case, the Buddha said, “Yes, I can do that. But first you must bring me a mustard seed from a home where no one has faced a similar loss.” So the woman set out. She went from home to home, knocking on doors and inquiring. It seemed everywhere she went someone in each family had suffered a terrible loss… fathers, daughters, uncles, mothers, friends…Everyone knew the heartbreaking loss of someone beloved. She couldn’t find a soul who hadn’t experienced some devastating pain like hers. In this way she healed the pain from her own loss, and in keeping with the first scenario, realized that despite her great love, there was nothing unique enough about her son to merit his resurrection above all other beings.

We live under the illusion that our individual suffering is unique. Yet the Buddha made very clear in his First Noble Truth that suffering is universal and absolute. Furthermore, we are interdependent. What you do affects me and vice versa. Who’s to say who healed whom when the grieving mother made her rounds? Yes, her grief was lessened when pooled with the grief of strangers she met. But how might she have helped them with their losses?

I keep saying death doesn’t arrive with a Save the Date notice but now I’m wondering if that’s not true. If we really listen and observe closely maybe death does arrive “on schedule.” Tracy is certainly doing her own magnificent, accepting, generous part to welcome it. To have this kind of time to plan… it’s just so much the opposite of what everyone exclaims when they first receive such news—“ There is no time left!” Not true. There is plenty if we take it with acceptance, and don’t act in denial.

Perhaps the hardest thing of all to see go in her is mental clarity. She has such a sharp and beautiful mind. Now when I’m talking with her half the time she nods out and is gone. Increasingly while talking she’ll say things that are complete non-sequiturs, coming out of her dream landscape. It’s hard to know when I should engage and follow up with “what?” and ask for explanations or what to just let go.

Everybody always says, “Now she’s at peace. Now she’s no longer suffering, in pain.” I didn’t feel any of that. What I felt was an immediate connection back to the life we shared for so many years. A life of tranquility, peace, and ease. With her there not breathing beside me I felt safe and comforted, our relationship restored.

Anyone who says anything other than “life isn’t fair” in response to those searing “Why her? Why now?” questions are themselves being unfair. Life is unfair. Painfully so. That’s all I could bring myself to say to those who themselves were grieving Tracy’s death. The moment anyone reaches for deeper explanations, whether arrived at through religion, culture, or philosophy, they do a disservice to those grieving.

In 2003, epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control, led by Eugenia Calle, published an analysis in The New England Journal of Medicine reporting that cancer mortality in the United States was clearly associated with obesity and overweight. The heaviest men and women, they reported, were 50 and 60 percent more likely, respectively, to die from cancer than the lean. This increased risk of death held true for a host of common cancers—esophageal, colorectal, liver, gallbladder, pancreatic, and kidney cancers, as well as, in women, cancers of the breast, uterus, cervix, and ovary. In 2004, the CDC followed up with an analysis linking cancer to diabetes, particularly pancreatic, colorectal, liver, bladder, and breast cancers. Cancer researchers trying to make sense of this association would later say that something about cancer seems to thrive on the metabolic environment of the obese and the diabetic. One conspicuous clue as to what that something might be was that the same association was seen with people who weren’t obese and diabetic (or at least not yet) but suffered only from metabolic syndrome and thus were insulin-resistant. The higher their levels of circulating insulin, and that of a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor, the greater the likelihood that they would get cancer.