Childhood Cancer Quotes

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this: The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before. Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?

Imagine the spirit as a mansion. You’ll guess we don’t use many rooms. Apart from a few moments in childhood we don’t dance around it in sunlight. But there’s a traffic of things in and out, and what happens is that unwanted bulks can gather inside. Gather and gather, menacing us. Unable to shift them, we hide in ever-smaller spaces. And in our last hole, life offers a choice: to play out our demise in parallel theatres - psychosis, zealotry, religion, cancer, addiction - or to bow quietly out. But beware: life doesn’t ask these high questions when we’re confident and fresh - it waits for hopelessness.

Be that as it may, I have been noticing a statistically significant correlation between excessive childhood exposure to radiation and cancers later in life.

at that instant i knew there was no horror the world could offer - no war, no genocide, no famine, no childhood cancer - to which Sidney Kroll would not see the funny side

The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn’t go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema.[2] They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.[3] Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.[4]

The longer I have been on the raw food path, the more I tend to come full circle and return to where my original ideas and inspiration of wanting to eat raw food come from - and that’s natural hygiene and its principles.

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent 'late period' prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, 'To ask after God's reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.' This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for 'natural evil'—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though 'he' is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and 'he' is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes—even Alzheimer’s.

Having known my parents for a little over eleven years, I began to wonder why either of them ever had children. As an almost twelve-year-old, I was clear that this was not the normal pondering of a child. I began to have doubts that I was loved. I began to see a pattern of me being the one who always seemed to be in the way. I began to believe that I really was a burden. I was the problem.

In other words, there are times when telling an outright lie may be the most loving thing a person can do. So I smile. As if I’ve just realized for the first time, thanks to your insight, Dad, that my race today was fantastic. As if I am proud of my thirty-fourth-place

One of their first decisions was to donate Robin’s body to Memorial Sloan Kettering. The doctors told them that they could learn from studying her disease, and my parents hoped that Robin’s death might lead to some benefit for other suffering children. Childhood cancer research became a lifelong cause for them.

The concern scientists had regarding passenger viruses was not unfounded. You may recall the disastrous SV40 monkey virus which contaminated the polio vaccines. There are scientists who claim this virus is the cause of multiple human cancers. On CDC’s website a page on vaccine safety, which was suddenly removed (archived copies exist), states that: “SV40 virus has been found in certain types of cancer in humans, but it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers.

As blood cholesterol levels decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver,II rectum,I colon,II male lung,I female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia,I childhood brain, adult brain,I stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased.

Cherish the past and see it ensconsed in a golden glow. Every phase of life seems better as it passes. As teenagers they look back at their childhood years, in their twenties sigh about hostel life, in their thirties raise a toast for their twenties and so on.

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.

Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain. No brain, no mind. We know this because if a part of the brain is destroyed through stroke or cancer or injury or surgery, whatever that part of the brain was doing is now gone. If the damage occurs in early childhood when the brain is especially plastic, or in adulthood in certain parts of the brain that are conducive to rewiring, then that brain function—that “mind” part of the brain—may be rewired into another neural network in the brain. But this process just further reinforces the fact that without neural connections in the brain there is no mind.

[Paul Olum] was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of [Richard] Feynman’s death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. “My wife died three years ago, also of cancer,” he said. ... I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick’s books and other things of Dick’s. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pictures of Dick on them. The article in Science about the Challenger episode. And also some of the recent books. I get a terrible feeling every time I look at them. How could someone like Dick Feynman be dead? This great and wonderful mind. This extraordinary feeling for things and ability is in the ground and there’s nothing there anymore. It’s an awful feeling. And I feel it—— A lot of people have died and I know about it. My parents are both dead and I had a younger brother who is dead. But I have this feeling about just two people. About my wife and about Dick. I suppose, although this wasn’t quite like childhood, it was graduate students together, and I do have more—— I don’t know, romantic, or something, feelings about Dick, and I have trouble realizing that he’s dead. He was such an extraordinarily special person in the universe. Gleick, James (2011-02-22). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

As adults, we’re not much less helpless than children, Wyatt thought, though we can hold a job and pay our way. The bogeyman is still there, the thing under the bed, the worse thing in the bedroom closet at night, the even worse thing in the cellar, in the attic, except now it has names like Cancer and Stroke and Aneurysm and the Unknown. You pretend you’re in control, that you’ve put behind you the helplessness you endured in childhood. Then shit happens, and you come to a moment like this, unable to avoid facing the truth that your control over your life is limited. You’re not the absolute master of your fate. In reluctant recognition of your helplessness, functioning on the edge of panic, you look haunted, frantic, as fragile as crystal—the way Joanna looks now, as no doubt so do I.

When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, 'Don't be like me.' The transformation of The Mick parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours.

Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.

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.

The ADA takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products. Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature. One: Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. TWO: Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals. Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) “meet and exceed requirements” for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers.

even when our shrinking work is effective, progress usually feels disappointingly slow and gradual. This is especially true during a flashback, when the critic can seem to be as strong as ever. As stated earlier, the critic grew carcinogenically in childhood. It is like a pervasive cancer that requires many uncomfortable operations to remove. Nonetheless, we can choose to face the acute pain of critic-shrinking work because we want to end the chronic pain of having the critic destroy our enjoyment of life. It is the fight of a lifetime.

Parents: Do you have babies and toddlers who are afflicted by terminal illness, rare and incurable diseases? When all is not well for them, read to them this beautiful, enjoyable and lively healing book breathed by the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God for your little ones' healing: Dear Baby Be Healed From Terminal Illness: Cutting Through soul and spirit by Stellah Mupanduki ...You will forget that there is illness in your household because you will encounter the healing presence of the Holy Spirit touching you and your little one with sound healing. Smile...cheer up, all will be well for you.

Between 1995 and 1997 the California-based healthcare network Kaiser Permanente gave more than 17,000 patients a questionnaire to assess the level of trauma in their childhoods. Questions included whether the patients' parents had been mentally or physically abusive or neglectful and whether their parents were divorced or had abused substances. This was called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. After taking the questionnaire, patients were given an ACE score on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the score, the more trauma a person experienced in childhood. The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn't go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema. They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide. Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals surging through our bodies like cortisol and adrenaline are healthy in moderation—you wouldn't be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they've finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who have suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres. In the end, these studies claimed that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes twenty years off your life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years old.

tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay’s life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: •​being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents •​being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you •​feeling that your family didn’t support each other •​having parents who were separated or divorced •​living with an alcoholic or a drug user •​living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide •​watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative

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.

Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents.70 They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections, diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, or from violence and accidents.71 Health surveys also indicate that most of the noninfectious diseases that kill or disable older people in developed nations are rare or unknown among middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers.72 These admittedly limited studies have found that hunter-gatherers rarely if ever get type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, breast cancer, asthma, and liver disease. They also don’t appear to suffer much from gout, myopia, cavities, hearing loss, collapsed arches, and other common ailments. To be sure, hunter-gatherers don’t live in perpetually perfect health, especially since tobacco and alcohol have become increasingly available to them, but the evidence suggests that they are healthy compared to many older Americans today despite never having received any medical care. In short, if you were to compare contemporary health data from people around the world with equivalent data from hunter-gatherers, you would not conclude that rising rates of common mismatch diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes are straightforward, inevitable by-products of economic progress and increased longevity. Moreover,

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate. Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be. As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it. That form of positive thinking is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. The adult who remains hurt without being aware of it makes this residual defence of the child into a life principle. The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: what is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future? Many approaches focus only on the second half of that healing dyad without considering fully what led to the manifestation of illness in the first place. Such “positive” methods fill the bookshelves and the airwaves. In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this fear to dominate engenders a state of childhood apprehension. Whether or not the apprehension is conscious, it is a state of stress. Second, lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress and one of the potent activators of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response. Third, stress wanes as independent, autonomous control increases. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces more powerful than he is. His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has “chosen” his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.

I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people. —1 Timothy 2:1 (NIV) In the middle of a busy morning at the office, I’d just finished a long e-mail to a colleague when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but answered. A faint voice said, “I’m Bernadette.” “I’m Rick Hamlin,” I replied, trying to remember if there was a Bernadette in any story I was working on. “May I help you?” “I need someone to pray for me,” she said. “My friend Mary is very sick from cancer. They’ve just put her on hospice care. I don’t know what to do…” Her voice broke. “You need to speak to someone at OurPrayer…,” I started to say. OurPrayer is our ministry here at Guideposts with dedicated, trained staff members and volunteers who pray for people on the Web and on the phone. But if I transferred the call, Bernadette might hang up, lose her nerve. I couldn’t put her on hold. “Tell me about your friend,” I said. They knew each other from childhood. They talked on the phone every day. The cancer had come very quickly. Bernadette was in shock. Each time she visited her friend, she was afraid of dissolving in tears. “If I could just pray with someone,” she said. I found myself asking, “Want me to pray with you right now?” “Yes, please,” she said. I closed my eyes and lowered my voice, hoping none of my colleagues would interrupt. I’m not sure what I said, but I trusted that the right words would come. “Be with Mary and Bernadette,” I ended. “Amen.” “Amen,” Bernadette said. “Thank you, sir. That was nice of you.” She hung up, and I returned to work. Maybe Bernadette was supposed to get my number. Perhaps praying for her was the most important thing I would do all day. Dear Lord, let me know how to say yes when You call. —Rick Hamlin Digging Deeper: Eph 6:18; Col 4:2

I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving children to express their sorrow, to feel understood in all their pain, and to come to know that God is their ultimate source of comfort, healing, hope, and joy here on earth, as well as in heaven.

A childhood like mine is a cancer; you know it will spread and alter everything it touches, and when you want to preserve the good things, you would be foolish to let them near such poison.

No. I wouldn’t see what Mary saw until I’d been witness to the untimely decline of a generation of colleagues exhausted by the demands of jobs that never paid them enough, drowning in debt to care for children riddled with disorders that couldn’t be cured; and the cousins—and the best friend from high school—who ended up in shelters or on the street, tossed out of houses they could no longer afford; and until the near-dozen suicides and overdoses of fortysomething childhood classmates in a mere space of three years; and the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins. I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. I wouldn’t see it clearly until the American Self had fully mastered the plunder, idealized and legislated the splitting of the spoils, and brought to near completion the wholesale pillage not only of the so-called colony—how provincial a locution that seems now!—but also of the very world itself. In short, I wouldn’t see what she saw back then until I’d failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I’d ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing.

Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. 

What has she got? Nothing but years and years of heartbreak, of being pushed physically, I am sure, into the country of her mother’s cancer. When she married me, with my encouraging smile and my famous family, she probably thought she was gaining security—exactly the thing she craved after that tiny lifeboat of a family in Bangalore. Instead she got the opposite. Or not the opposite—just a continuation of her childhood. Secretly we are all looking for ways to continue our childhoods—the hurt, the pain, the love, the fear, the shame. So just as I recognized in her someone who would let me carry on with my bitterness, she must have recognized in me someone who would let her down repeatedly. Lead her straight into the waltzing, frizzing arms of cancer.

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

Chart 4.4: Disease Groupings Observed in Rural China Disease of Affluence (Nutritional extravagance) Cancer (colon, lung, breast, leukemia, childhood brain, stomach, liver), diabetes, coronary heart disease Disease of Poverty (Nutritional inadequacy and poor sanitation) Pneumonia, intestinal obstruction, peptic ulcer, digestive disease, pulmonary tuberculosis, parasitic disease, rheumatic heart disease, metabolic and endocrine disease other than diabetes, diseases of pregnancy, and many others Disease associations of this

Not one but many Djunas descended the staircase of the barge, one layer formed by the parents, the childhood, another molded by her profession and her friends, still another born of history geology, climate, race, economics, and all the backgrounds and backdrops, the sky and nature of the earth, the pure sources of birth, the influence of a tree, a word dropped carelessly, an image seen, and all the corrupted sources: books, art, dogmas, tainted friendships, and all the places where a human being is wounded... People add up their physical mishaps, the stubbed toes, the cut finger, the burn scar, the fever, the cancer, the microbe, the infection, the wounds and broken bones. They never add up the accumulated bruises and scars of the inner lining, forming a complete universe of reactions, a reflected world through which no event could take place without being subjected to a personal private interpretation, through this kaleidoscope of memory, through the peculiar formation of the psyche's sensitive photographic plates, to this assemblage of emotional chemicals through which every word, every event, every experience is filtered, digested, deformed, before it is projected again upon people and relationships.

belief was widespread that electromagnetic fields from power lines and household appliances like microwave ovens were linked to childhood leukemia and other cancers. But there was little or no evidence of this in broad epidemiological studies.

Esther’s mother died of cancer soon after we said goodbye, and Esther emigrated to Canada where she now lectures in literature and hopes for tenure. She returns to Bulgaria once every few years. ‘I’ll never feel particularly Canadian,’ she emailed me, ‘but I’ll never go back to Bulgaria, and after ten years away, in what way am I actually Bulgarian?’ Right now, that’s a question I can’t answer for her, or even for myself. Right now, my deep suspicion is that it’s possible, perhaps even inevitable, to live between – no, among – nationalities. It’s a bit like wearing different suits, all of them the wrong size, all of them slightly ridiculous, either too baggy or too tight. They don’t make the right size anymore, it’s been discontinued. But I also suspect that the Bulgarian suit was never the right fit for me, or for Esther.

Most of us would like “America’s Doctor” to properly diagnose our illnesses using the best science, and then instruct us on how to get healthy. What if, instead of spending their entire budgets developing profitable pharmaceutical products, Dr. Fauci and the heads of other NIH institutes deployed researchers to explore the links between glyphosate in food and the explosion of gluten allergies, the link between pesticide residues and the epidemic of neurological diseases and cancers, the causal connections between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease, between mercury from coal plants and escalating autism rates, and the association of airborne particulates with the asthma epidemic? What if NIH financed research to explore the association between childhood vaccines and the explosion of juvenile diabetes, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis, and the links between aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the epidemics of food allergies and allergic rhinitis? What if they studied the impacts of sugar and soft drinks on obesity and diabetes, and the association between endocrine

We formalized our group as the Vantastix and sang at dinner parties and charity events. My favorite venue though, was the City of Hope, where we went room to room singing for kids battling cancer. In 50 plus years of show business, I never had a better audience. Most of those little kids were bald; a fair number could barely sit up in bed and there was a sad handful who could not even do that. We stopped at the bed of a very sick 15-year-old boy. We tiptoed into his room and quietly sang a song; he did not react. Thinking he was asleep, we began to file out but suddenly we hear a thin voice ask, "Could I hear another one, please?" We turned around and sang a whole bunch of songs. He barely opened his eyes. But after we finished Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, I saw his mouth curl into a faint smile. As far as I'm concerned, applause does not get any louder.

Unlike normal parents, psychopaths do not encourage independence or self-confidence in their children. Instead, they work to undermine the child’s self-esteem, making derogatory comments about their skills or appearance. Any encouragement that a psychopath might offer is for their own ends and they will be the first to take credit for their child’s achievement. The last photo I have of my mother before she was diagnosed with cancer is the one I brought to her hospital room in Indianapolis in which she and my father are standing at my side as I proudly hold up an award for my research in childhood identity theft—work that was born from the decades of paranoia, fear, and financial ruin that she caused.

Unlike normal parents, psychopaths do not encourage independence or self-confidence in their children. Instead, they work to undermine the child’s self-esteem, making derogatory comments about their skills or appearance. Any encouragement that a psychopath might offer is for their own ends and they will be the first to take credit for their child’s achievement. The last photo I have of my mother before she was diagnosed with cancer is the one I brought to her hospital room in Indianapolis in which she and my father are standing at my side as I proudly hold up an award for my research in childhood identity theft—work that was born from the decades of paranoia, fear, and financial ruin that she caused. In it, my mother is so happy that she appears to be laughing.

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced it wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory. It’s fascinating that even though the intellectual stance of the post-modern deconstructionist era is against theory, particularly overarching theory, in reality what every academic wants to express is theory. This is, in part, aping science, but it’s also an escape hatch. Your close textual reading of Jane Austen could well be wrong, and could be shown to be wrong by a more knowledgeable critic. But your theory of radical feminization and authoritarian revolt in the work of Jane Austen—with reference to your own childhood feelings—is untouchable. Similarly, your analysis of the origins of the First World War could be debated by other authorities. But your New Historicist essay, which includes your own fantasy about what it would be like if you were fighting in the first war…well, that’s unarguable. And even better, how about a theory of the origin of warfare beginning with Paleolithic cave men? That’s really unarguable.

When writing personal diary, it is important to mention childhood and UG College life too. Childhood friends Gopi, Jaya Krishna, Kaliraj, Deepa are now unknown to me, I do not even know what they are doing and where they are now. High school friends are in touch and they are best business people now with so much business attitude than neutral attitude, which is why I do not indulge with them much and anyhow I am entering MSc PhD for sure, so those people are just friends and let it be. And UG life, Kalasalingam, Kalasalingam I can not say my memories in single Para, just like Nalanda it needs at least 10000 pages to write still will go incomplete because of sub stories like Maha Bharata, Three completely genuine friends/ Persons, 1) Dayana Kirubavathy, 2)Arun Arumugaperumal 3) Fathima Mohideen Rest of the people were in one or another way fraudsters. There is a special fraud which I like very much because although she is fraud but still she herself accepts the fact that she is fraud and want to compensate the society with science as it was her Dharma - The science she chose was Cancer Biology, and her name is Jayasindu Mathiyazhagan now a Scientist. ButI do not mingle with these people now because they found their way already, And I have found a way for me. So let them be wherever they are and If met by chance, it better to say Hi and Smile and ask how they are, that is more than enough

So many men have died in despair. And those suffered more than Christ. But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever. All men have a cancer that gnaws them, a daily discharge, a recurring evil: their own dissatisfaction; the point of conflict between their real, skeletal being and the infinite complexity of life. And all men realize it, sooner or later, by slow perception or a sudden flash of insight. Almost all men, it seems, can retrace, in their childhood, the signs foreshadowing their adult agony. To investigate this hotbed of retrospective discoveries, alarming as they prove to be, is to see the sufferings of the grown man predicted by the irreparable acts and words of his infancy. I Fioretti of the Devil. Contemplate this horror always: what has been, will be.

They found those who reported having negative experiences with friends and acquaintances had a higher level of proteins related to inflammation in the body, compared with those who reported positive interactions with people. These proteins are associated with a number of chronic conditions, including heart disease, cancer, and depression.

Glass" In every bar there’s someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him, a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone. Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing, the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him. And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles, the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining, toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood, a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex, just a blessed peace that seems final but isn’t. And finally the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like; who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely, who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether, the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human? Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty, against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well? Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying; Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something, come close I want to whisper it, to pour the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you, listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober, while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass, while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay, give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop, I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up. Kim Addonizio, Tell Me (BOA Editions Ltd.; First Edition (July 1, 2000)

Xanthi came into my childhood in August of 1954, arriving at Union Station near the Chicago River, final stop in a transatlantic journey to help take care of me and my siblings in suburban Oak Park while Mom underwent treatment, such as it was in those days, for breast cancer metastases. Xanthi was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s, maybe even a distant relative. Didn’t matter to me as a four-year-old boy. Whoever she was related to, she left her home on the Peloponnesus to live with us for room and board and some money to send back home after a string of cataclysms bludgeoning Greece at the time.

I knew that a feeling of being whole wouldn’t be possible until both of my children were safe and under one roof.

I accepted that this was happening; I was having a baby today. A very premature baby.

The weirdest part about the coming days and weeks was just that; they happened. Bills were due, meals were eaten, dishes and laundry were washed, the mail still ran, and the world around us was starkly normal.

Now he needed me more than ever, and all I could wonder was if I was enough.

Looking back, I can confidently say that bed rest was one of the most isolating and truly depressing times of my life.

Life in the NICU is no walk in the park, but Caleb’s stay was about as smooth as it could be.

I needed to protect myself, my mind, my emotions, from a depth of pain I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear. In a strange, convoluted corner of my subconscious, I started to distance myself emotionally. It allowed me to be there for him in every way, for every thing, all without seeming to tire, all without tears or outward signs of distress. I was strong they told me. But it wasn’t real at all.

Asian women are up to five times less likely to develop breast cancer than North American women.146 Why? One possibility is their intake of green tea, a common staple in many Asian diets. Green tea has been associated with about a 30 percent reduction in breast cancer risk.147 Another strong possibility is a relatively high intake of soy, which, if consumed consistently during childhood, may cut the risk of breast cancer later in life by half. If women consume soy primarily as an adult, though, their risk reduction may only be closer to 25 percent.148

We must not fall into the typical shadow defense of our culture’s scientific complex which is to think that to name something means we have some control over it. I’ve heard many, many people say something like, “that’s my money complex—but, I’m doing better at it,” or “that’s my critical mother—but I’m doing better than I used to.” This approach is missing the point of healing and transformation. It is simply causing a new inner battle on a different level. It continues to split us against ourselves, rather than helping us find wholeness and solidity. This error reflects a cultural complex which is that we are taught to live our lives according to the ways of Mars, the god of war and not the ways of Eros, the god of love and relationships. Our society teaches us that war is the way. We declare war on poverty, drugs, cancer, our weight, in fact on whatever symptoms are giving us the most trouble. We declare war on ourselves in this process. And, as far as I can see in my lifetime we rarely, if ever, win these wars. Why don’t we ever win some of these wars, we might wonder? Well, let me suggest an answer on the personal level, because as you know, Jung thought that in today’s world that’s where change must start. Most of the complexes that really trouble us come from problems in Eros, those related to love and relationships. They are wounds of the lack of love, the lack of understanding and personal concern, the lack of affirmation in childhood, and these events founded our complexes. Even wounds of fate, like my mother’s death when I was a child, which was a trauma, brought a wound of Eros because one of its major sources was lost, I was abandoned. Abuse is a betrayal of Eros. There are, of course, many more than I have named. The point I want to make is that you cannot heal wounds to Eros with the techniques of Mars: aggression, suppression and control. Yet that is what we try to do. We want to overcome, defeat our complexes.

For every difficult question of her childhood, for instance about sex or cancer, her father had answered legally accurately (preferably with Latin) and using obscure medical terms (‘lesion’ for tumour, ‘procedure’ for operation). So although he could never be accused of lying he could also never, quite, be understood.

I think I have always been trying to perform for my childhood self who had cancer, to do something great for her, even in writing this book.

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

childhood adversity “may be the leading cause of poor health among adults in the United States.” This is because the chronic stress puts us at risk for all sorts of ailments down the line—from ulcers and depression to cancer and autoimmune diseases. And make no mistake, family heroes are not impervious to this kind of stress. They may be more successful than others at battling back against it—at putting together a life in spite of it—but here is the rub: Battling back is stressful, too.

Regular consumption of fish has been shown to exert a strong anti-inflammatory effect, reduce risk for heart disease, help protect against asthma in children, moderate chronic lung disease, reduce the risk of breast and other cancers by stunting tumor growth, and ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and certain bone and joint diseases. Nursing and pregnant women enjoy a host of benefits from fish consumption, including support for fetal and early childhood brain and retinal development and a lowered risk of premature birth.

If we look at a map of the world today, one of the striking observations is that illnesses like Crohn’s disease are common in more developed countries and rare in less developed ones. The hygiene hypothesis accounts for this uneven distribution by suggesting that less childhood exposure to bacteria and parasites in affluent societies like the United States and Europe actually increases susceptibility to disease by suppressing the natural development of the immune system. This concept has also been linked to the rise of many of our chronic ailments: the obesity epidemic, deadly disorders like metabolic syndrome and heart disease, psychiatric conditions like depression, poorly understood afflictions like autism, and even some forms of cancer—and clinical studies have shown significant disturbances in the microbiome in all of them. We spend huge amounts of time making sure we’re clean—scrubbing ourselves with harsh soaps, sanitizing our hands and environment with chemicals, and eliminating any trace of dirt from our homes and lives—but since the evidence suggests that germs may actually be essential for our well-being, it may be time to rethink our approach to cleanliness and hygiene.

finish. As if I am satisfied with my performance. As if

There was definitely something to be said for grown men dressed in nice suits instead of hoodlums in baggy jeans with three inches of underwear showing.

In your food and mood journal, in addition to what you are eating, note the following as well: What’s going on at home? Do you feel supported? Are you a caregiver for loved ones while trying to take care of yourself? Is there childhood trauma in your background or in your parents’ background? Do you have a meditation or spiritual practice? Are you living your purpose? How these questions are manifested or suppressed often shows up in our relationship to food and mood. The process of keeping a journal helps to release stored emotion and bring awareness to what you are feeling, and can reveal if you are self-medicating with food or alcohol.

I don't want to progress, I want to regress. [...] Do you know why I called my first book Tropic of Cancer? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch... Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse... What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure... It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive - but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.

I remember something I read months ago.It had to do with unfulfilled dreams and what happens to them. They turn into regrets and pain, and I know I've tried not to feel the pain. Eventually, I end up not getting out of bed the entire weekend simply because of the unfullfilled dreams of my misspent, unhappy childhood and the years I have wasted since leaving my parents' house. I think all those regrets and dreams end up robbing us of our lives. They suck the life force right out of us until we are nothing but shadows of our true potential. I think unfullfilled dreams are the cancecr and the tumors we die from. They infest us and in the end kill us slowly. I'm so tired of being paralyzed by my own misery, unable to move, unable to get up, to dust myself off and move on. I don't want to die a slow and miserable death from cancer.

I don't know if they ever knew how uncomfortable it was to hear over and over again that my parents were bad people. Eventually, I could only draw the conclusion that bad people came from bad people, so I must be a bad person, too.