“
I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this IS grace.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
Relying on his own strength and the support of his family and community, Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace—not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would “overcome” or “beat” cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one. He cried on the day he was diagnosed. He cried while looking at a drawing we kept on the bathroom mirror that said, “I want to spend all the rest of my days here with you.” He cried on his last day in the operating room. He let himself be open and vulnerable, let himself be comforted. Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both. [p. 253]
”
”
Anne Lamott (Imperfect Birds)
“
Pam's father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn't surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you're going to find that going around.
”
”
Stephen King (Duma Key)
“
He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.
”
”
Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)
“
Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
Until we accept that our children have much more of a risk of being sexually abused than drowning in a pool, being struck by a car, stricken with cancer, hurt by a vaccination, or diagnosed with ebola, we contribute to a culture of panic and ignorance.
”
”
Ann Brasco
“
Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.
”
”
Anna Quindlen (A Short Guide to a Happy Life)
“
Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
There are more sociopaths among us than people who suffer from the much-publicized disorder of anorexia, four times as many sociopaths as schizophrenics, and one hundred times as many sociopaths as people diagnosed with a known scourge such as colon cancer. —Dr. Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
”
”
Jackson MacKenzie (Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People)
“
So what’s your story?” he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance. “I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—” “No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera.” “Um,” I said.
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
It’s as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I’m their tumor.
”
”
Danielle Esplin (Give It Back)
“
One day he felt ready to give up on life. He overdosed on heroine and woke up a day later at the hospital, where he was diagnosed with cancer. Just perfect, he thought.
”
”
Jason Medina (The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel)
“
I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.
”
”
Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
“
At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from cervical cancer. The Pap smear had the potential to decrease that death rate by 70 percent or more, but there were two things standing in its way: first, many women - like Henrietta - simply didn't get the test; and, second, even when they did, few doctors knew how to interpret the results accurately, because they didn't know what various stages of cervical cancer looked like under a microscope. Some mistook cervical infections for cancer and removed a woman's entire reproductive tract when all she needed was antibiotics. Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized cancer. And even when doctors correctly diagnosed precancerous changes, they often didn't know how those changes should be treated.
”
”
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Young Adult Edition)
“
A newly diagnosed person with access to the Internet is information’s incubant. Data visits like a minor god. Awake, we pass the day staring into the screen’s abyss, feeling the constriction of the quantitative, trying to learn to breathe through the bar graphs, head full of sample sizes and survival curves, eyes dimming, body reverent to math.
”
”
Anne Boyer (The Undying)
“
In a recent experiment a computer algorithm correctly diagnosed 90 per cent of lung cancer cases presented to it, while human doctors had a success rate of only 50 per cent.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
Raskin died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, not long after Jobs was diagnosed with the disease.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Connor was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer two and a half years ago, when she was thirty-nine. She was given months to live.
”
”
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
“
Since her diagnoses she has been fading like a light bulb with cancer’s hand on the rotary dimmer.
”
”
Danielle Esplin (Give It Back)
“
American Cancer Society estimates that in 2015 1,658,370 new cancer cases will be diagnosed and that in the same year about 1,600 people will die from cancer-related conditions daily.
”
”
Tom Brokaw (A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope)
“
Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi
“
You can make quite a life for yourself hosting charity dinners and collecting art. You can find a way to be happy with whatever the truth is. Until your daughter dies. Connor was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer two and a half years ago, when she was thirty-nine. She was given months to live. I knew what it was like to realize that the one you love would leave this earth well before you.
”
”
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
“
And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.)
”
”
Susan Sontag
“
I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore.
In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned.
I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend.
I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.
”
”
Kate Bowler (No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
“
I pulled out, making the driver in the battered BMW coming up behind me gesture in my direction with an angry scowl. Now, now. He had plenty of room to slow down. I reckon that anyone who gets irritated by something like that needs to sort their life out. If you’re getting stressed out by having to brake slightly, what happens to your equilibrium when your pipes burst or your kid gets suspended from school or your mum is diagnosed with cancer? It simply isn’t worth the effort to sweat the small stuff.
”
”
Helen Harper (Slouch Witch (The Lazy Girl's Guide to Magic, #1))
“
Once I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to see death as both doctor and patient. As a doctor, I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I’m going to win!” or ask “Why me?” (Answer: Why not me?) I knew a lot about medical care, complications, and treatment algorithms. I quickly learned from my oncologist and my own study that stage IV lung cancer today was a disease whose story might be changing, like AIDS in the late 1980s: still a rapidly fatal illness but with emerging therapies that were, for the first time, providing years of life. While being trained as a physician and scientist had helped me process the data and accept the limits of what that data could reveal about my prognosis, it didn’t help me as a patient. It didn’t tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded. Nor did it tell me whether to fight for my career, to reclaim the ambitions I had single-mindedly pursued for so long, but without the surety of the time to complete them. Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living—and I needed Emma’s help to do so. Torn between being a doctor and being a patient, delving into medical science and turning back to literature for answers, I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life—or perhaps find a new one. —
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
“
I love my passengers. I remember one woman in particular--a senior who had gotten on my bus. She seemed completely lost. She said she was going to a restaurant on City Island Avenue. I could see she was confused. There was just something about her. She looked so elegant, but with a fur coat on a hot summer day, so I said, 'Are you okay?' and she said, 'I'm fine, but I don't know what restaurant I'm meeting my friends at.' I said, 'Get on. Sit in the front.' I asked a gentleman to get up so she could sit near me, and I said, 'I'll run in and I'll check each restaurant for you.'
So I checked the restaurants and no luck, but at the very, very last restaurant on the left, I said, 'It's got to be this one. Let me swing the bus around,' and I swung it around. I said, 'Don't move. Let me make sure this is the place before you get out.'It was a hot day, and she's got fur on. She could pass out. So I said, 'Stay here, sweetie. It's nice and cool in here.' I went in and I said 'There's a lady in the bus and she's not sure of the restaurant,' and I saw a whole bunch of seniors there and they said, 'Oh, that's her!'
I ran back to the bus and I said, 'sweetie, your restaurant is right here.' I said, 'Let me kneel the bus.' Kneeling the bus means I bring it closer to the ground so she gets off easier. And I said, 'Don't move.' I remember my right hand grabbed her right hand. I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine. It was a bus, but I wanted to make her feel like it was a limousine. And she said, 'I have been diagnosed with cancer--but today is the best day of my life.'
And I've never forgotten that woman (Weeping). She's diagnosed with cancer and just because I helped her off the bus, she said she felt like Cinderella. Can't get better than that. And doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It's pretty awesome.
”
”
Dave Isay
“
...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.
”
”
Kai Bird (The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter)
“
As of the writing of this particular book, I have 43 “close friends,”* 196 “good friends,”** and 2,200 “affable acquaintances.”***
*These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung cancer.
** These are people whose death from lung cancer would make me profoundly sad.
*** These are people I would generally hope would recover from lung cancer.
”
”
Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)
“
Messiah thought back, his mind floating back in time to the day he’d taken Mo to Stepping Stone Falls to let her high come down. That morning. He’d found out that morning. He had been diagnosed with cancer. It was the biggest reason he had warned Morgan that he would never be able to stay. That he would hurt her. That they would never be. There was no future with him. No wedding. No growing old together. He knew that it would hurt her to only have him for a little while, but that small moment of time that they had carved out was the best days of his life. Those days outweighed every ounce of pain he had ever felt. He looked at his illness as a blessing, because he would have never crossed the line with Morgan if he hadn’t been diagnosed that day. Hearing that he was sick made him want to risk what little time he had left on her. Messiah couldn’t allow himself to die without indulging in an angel. Morgan had been his biggest blessing and he had been her biggest curse. She would never know how sorry he was. He would never be able to tell her. “It’s been awhile. About a year or so,” he said. “You’re 180 pounds. According to your records from your doctors in Michigan, you were 225 at your last visit. You know what that means, right? They should have told you what to look for. The signs. You should have…” “I know,” he said. “I was busy living. I didn’t want to take the time out to die. I found a girl to love me for a little while. It was worth it.” Messiah stepped down and the woman looked at him in stun.
”
”
Ashley Antoinette (Ethic 5)
“
At the outset I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course there are many events in human history that can only be labeled as evil, but from the standpoint of inner individual experience the distinction has become blurred for me. Some things start out looking great but wind up terribly, while other things seem bad in the beginning but turn out to be blessings in disguise. I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, which I thought was a bad thing. But the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I'd ever been, and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful, but it resulted in a complete cure, which I decided was good. I later found out it may also have caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant. At some point I gave up trying to decide what's ultimately good or bad. I truly do not know....Although not knowing may itself seem like a bad thing, I am convinced it is one of the great gifts of the dark night of the soul. To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death about what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience-because there really is no way of knowing. I don't have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure, but they've given to me in the course of life; I haven't had to figure out a single one.
”
”
Gerald G. May (The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth)
“
Anyway, as I was saying, marriage sucks. It sucks the life and soul out of you. There are days I want to kill him, and there are days I want to torture him before I kill him.” Lizzy is working so hard at containing her laughter that she almost falls out of her chair. “There are days I wish he’d never been born. There are days I wish I’d never been born. But, listen to this carefully. They are just thoughts. Random fleeting thoughts that cross my mind when I’m upset about accidentally burning supper. Did he make me burn supper? No, he didn’t, but I heaped that blame on him. Or when I forgot about a load of his underpants in the washer and they soured. He bore the brunt of that blame, too. What about the abuse he got when I gave birth to our child? Twelve hours of non-stop name calling during labor, and that man took every last bit of it and fed me words of love and encouragement to boot!” Lizzy and I are now captivated by her speech. “When and if you get married, those thoughts will come to you. You’re going to fight. You’re going to have resentful moments. You’re going to wonder if it’s worth it all. My Stanley is eighty-six years old, and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer four weeks ago. If we’re lucky, I might have another couple of months with him the doctors say. All that complaining I did earlier… all that truth I gave you… you’d think I regretted marrying him, wouldn’t you? Well, I don’t. I’d give anything to have sixty-eight more years with him.
”
”
Rhonda R. Dennis (Yours Always)
“
Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.
”
”
Andy Slavitt (Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response)
“
Dying isn’t the end of the world,” my mother liked to joke after she was diagnosed as terminal. I never really understood what she meant, until the day I suddenly did—a few months after she died—when, at age thirty-eight, the breast cancer I’d been in treatment for became metastatic and incurable. There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband’s face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup.
”
”
Nina Riggs (The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying)
“
Cancer is another forbidden or “whisper” topic. I read about a writer named Emily McDowell who said the worst part of being diagnosed with lymphoma wasn’t feeling sick from chemo or losing her hair. “It was the loneliness and isolation I felt when many of my close friends and family members disappeared because they didn’t know what to say, or said the absolute wrong thing without realizing it.” In response, Emily created “empathy cards.” I love them all but these two are my favorites, making me want to laugh and cry simultaneously.
”
”
Sheryl Sandberg (Option B)
“
At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who are special—people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,” said Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago,” [Christopher] observed in his final column for Vanity Fair, “I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense . . . However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”6
”
”
David Landers (Optimistic Nihilism: A Psychologist's Personal Story & (Biased) Professional Appraisal of Shedding Religion)
“
All those years when Ronni thought she was sick, all those years convinced that every mole was melanoma, every cough was lung cancer, every case of heartburn was an oncoming heart attack, after all those years, when the gods finally stopped taking care of her she wasn't scared. What a pity, she thought after the doctor first diagnosed her. Then, when she refused to believe it, after the second, and the third, agreed, she thought again, what a pity I wasted all those years worrying about the worst. Somehow now that the worst was upon her, it was peaceful, calming, as if this was what she had always been waiting for. Now that it was here, it wasn't scary at all.
”
”
Jane Green (The Sunshine Sisters)
“
The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary.
”
”
Oliver Bullough (Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World)
“
And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why?
At the nursing home I did not have time to go into it... But when I reached home, all the sadness and horror of these last days dropped upon me with all its weight. And I too had a cancer eating into me—remorse. “Don’t let them operate on her.” And I had not prevented anything. Often, hearing of sick people undergoing a long martyrdom, I had felt indignant at the apathy of their relatives. “For my part, I should kill him.” At the first trial I had given in: beaten by the ethics of society, I had abjured my own. “No,” Sartre said to me. “You were beaten by technique: and that was fatal.” Indeed it was. One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions. The patient becomes their property: get him away from them if you can! There were only two things to choose between on that Wednesday—operating or euthanasia. Maman, vigorously resuscitated, and having a strong heart, would have stood out against intestinal stoppage for a long while and she would have lived through hell, for the doctors would have refused euthanasia…
A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you “Have pity on me” in vain.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)
“
Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temperature, but the air-conditioning system always returns the temperature to the same set point. Some air-conditioning systems are set at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Indeed, even if our gloomy friend wins $50,000,000 in the morning, discovers the cure for both AIDS and cancer by noon, makes peace between Israelis and Palestinians that afternoon, and then in the evening reunites with her long-lost child who disappeared years ago - she would still be incapable of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
You can make quite a life for yourself hosting charity dinners and collecting art. You can find a way to be happy with whatever the truth is. Until your daughter dies. Connor was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer two and a half years ago, when she was thirty-nine. She was given months to live. I knew what it was like to realize that the one you love would leave this earth well before you. But nothing could prepare me for the pain of watching my child suffer. I held her when she puked from the chemo. I wrapped her in blankets when she was so cold she was crying. I kissed her forehead like she was my baby again, because she was forever my baby. I told her every single day that her life had been the world’s greatest gift to me, that I believed I was put on earth not to make movies or wear emerald-green gowns and wave at crowds but to be her mother. I sat next to her hospital bed. “Nothing I have ever done,” I said, “has made me as proud as the day I gave birth to you.” “I know,” she said. “I’ve always known that.” I had made a point of not bullshitting her ever since her father died. We had the sort of relationship where we believed each other, believed in each other. She knew she was loved. She knew that she had changed my life, that she had changed the world. She made it eighteen months before she passed away. And when they put her in the ground next to her father, I broke like I have never broken before. The devastating luxury of panic overtook me. And it has never left.
”
”
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
“
And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.
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Ted Kerasote (Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs)
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We blame the sun for skin cancer, but it’s not that simple. If it were, our years of slathering sunscreen and avoiding the sun would have resulted in a decrease in skin cancer diagnoses. But since sun protection factor (SPF) sunscreens received FDA approval in the 1970s, the incidence of melanoma in children has risen nearly 3 percent per year—throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the incidence of melanoma in the United States increased faster than that of any other cancer. Since the 1960s, rates of skin cancer in lighter-skinned populations—those at highest risk for skin cancer—have continued to increase by between 5 and 8 percent every single year. First-time melanoma diagnoses overall have tripled over the past thirty-five years, and just between 2000 and 2013 there was a nearly 2 percent increase each year.
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Liz Wolfe (Eat the Yolks)
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What does a mind that is focused on hope look like? I read recently about a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer and was given three months to live. Her doctor told her to make preparations to die, so she contacted her pastor and told him how she wanted things arranged for her funeral service—which songs she wanted to have sung, what Scriptures should be read, what words should be spoken—and that she wanted to be buried with her favorite Bible. But before he left, she called out to him, “One more thing.” “What?” “This is important. I want to be buried with a fork in my right hand.” The pastor did not know what to say. No one had ever made such a request before. So she explained. “In all my years going to church functions, whenever food was involved, my favorite part was when whoever was cleaning dishes of the main course would lean over and say, You can keep your fork. “It was my favorite part because I knew that it meant something great was coming. It wasn’t Jell-O. It was something with substance—cake or pie—biblical food. “So I just want people to see me there in my casket with a fork in my hand, and I want them to wonder, What’s with the fork? Then I want you to tell them, Something better is coming. Keep your fork.” The pastor hugged the woman good-bye. And soon after, she died. At the funeral service people saw the dress she had chosen, saw the Bible she loved, and heard the songs she loved, but they all asked the same question: “What’s with the fork?” The pastor explained that this woman, their friend, wanted them to know that for her—or for anyone who dies in Christ—this is not a day of defeat. It is a day of celebration. The real party is just starting. Something better is coming.
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John Ortberg Jr. (If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat)
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A metabolic, deep nutrition, and nontoxic approach is the answer to cancer prevention and management. This book is our call to arms—we must focus on the 90–95 percent of cancers that are caused by the standard American diet and exposure to environmental toxins. We simply cannot keep shrugging our shoulders when we, or our loved ones, are diagnosed. If a new virus began to kill one of every four people in the United States, you can bet your pink ribbon a cure would be found, and fast. While Western medicine continues to drive along the dusty, dead-end road seeking the genetic and targeted answer to cancer, it is time for us to start taking control of our own health and health care choices. We’ll say it again: Cancer is a metabolic, environmental, and emotional disease. It’s not just a tumor; it signifies correctable imbalances that occur inside and outside our body. Now is the time for lifelong remission. It is time for some real hope and to disarm the most deadly disease of modern times. How? With the metabolic approach to cancer.
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Nasha Winters (The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet, and Nontoxic Bio-Individualized Therapies)
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Specifically, participants were asked to describe their relationship with each parent using the following scale: “very close,” “warm and friendly,” “tolerant,” or “strained and cold.” Ninety-one percent of participants who stated that their relationship with their mother was tolerant or strained were diagnosed with a significant health issue (such as cancer, coronary artery disease, hypertension, etc.) in midlife, compared with 45 percent of participants—less than half—who reported that their relationship with their mothers was warm or close. Similar numbers were reported for participants who described their relationship with their fathers. Eighty-two percent of the participants who reported tolerant or strained relationships with their fathers had significant health issues in midlife, compared with 50 percent of those who had warm or close relationships with their fathers. If participants had a strained relationship with both parents, the results were startling: 100 percent had significant health issues, versus 47 percent of those who described their relationships with their parents as being warm and close.1
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Mark Wolynn (It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle)
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to an AirPort Express in his hospital room, announcing his surgery. He assured them that the type of pancreatic cancer he had “represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was).” He said he would not require chemotherapy or radiation treatment, and he planned to return to work in September. “While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.” One side effect of the operation would become a problem for Jobs because of his obsessive diets and the weird routines of purging and fasting that he had practiced since he was a teenager. Because the pancreas provides the enzymes that allow the stomach to digest food and absorb nutrients, removing part of the organ makes it hard to get enough protein. Patients are advised to make sure that they eat frequent meals and maintain a nutritious diet, with a wide variety of meat and fish proteins as well as full-fat milk products. Jobs had never done this, and he never would.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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Western medicine’s love of drawing people into diagnostic categories and applying disease names to small differences and minor bodily changes is not specific to functional disorders – it is a general trend. Pre-diabetes, polycystic ovaries, some cancers and many more conditions have all been subject to the problem of over-inclusive diagnosis. My biggest concern in this regard is the degree to which many people are wholly unaware of the subjective nature of the medical classification of disease. If a person is told they have this or that disorder, they assume it must be right. The Latin names we give to things and the shiny scanning machines make it look as if there is more authority than actually exists. To a certain extent, Sienna pursued each diagnosis she was given, but other people have diagnoses thrust upon them, having no idea that there might be anything controversial about it – and having no idea that they have a choice. Western medicine’s hold on people, and its sense of being systematic and accurate, makes it a powerful force in the transmission of cultural concepts of what constitutes wellness or ill health. But Western medicine is just as enslaved to fads and trends as any other tradition of medicine.
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Suzanne O'Sullivan (The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness)
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IN THE PAST, when dying was typically a more precipitous process, we did not have to think about a question like this. Though some diseases and conditions had a drawn-out natural history—tuberculosis is the classic example—without the intervention of modern medicine, with its scans to diagnose problems early and its treatments to extend life, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and dying was commonly a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Others did have a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from progressive and far longer-lasting (and highly dreaded) tubercular consumption. Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him. But, as end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people generally experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning. And you either got through it or you didn’t.
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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I think this book is the most healed and loving form I can make. Then should I send this book across the ocean to where my grandmother is buried-give it to the worms and bugs who live in the soil of my grandmother’s grave? But why do they deserve this sadness? Maybe I’ll just scatter it like ash in the world-as if publishing a book is like scattering ashes from an urn-in the sea, in the forest, in a city, anywhere.
Maybe I will take this book to my mother’s house. I will knock on her door and go up to her and say, It’s here. On the page. Your mother’s sadness, and your sadness, and mine. Although not all of the reasons. I don’t know all of the reasons.
As she reads through it, I’ll stand there and wonder: Do you think with our lives we validated your mother? Do you think we helped her at all? Did we do our job? Can her life be said to be worth what you thought it was worth? Is this the first thing we have ever done together? You carried the nightmares, and I carried them, too. Can we put them down now? In putting down this book, will you put your sadness down? Put down whatever remains of your task, and finally rest satisfied?
Maybe she will say, It’s okay that you don’t know all of the reasons. When I diagnose a cancer, I don’t need to say the reasons. I’m just asked whether it’s malignant or benign.
Then these tears, I will say, this pain, this sadness, this tumour-like growth. In your professional opinion, is it malignant or benign?
I’ve looked it over carefully-and my opinion is that it’s benign. My suggestion is not to operate. There are more dangers associated with taking it out than leaving it inside.
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Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
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Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever
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Deborah Copaken (Ladyparts)
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The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.
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Tom Brokaw (A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope)
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Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was “a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” Rand Paul said Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Marco Rubio called him “dangerous” and warned that we should not hand “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.” And then every single one of those Republicans endorsed Trump.
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Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
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Fortunately, I have neither coronavirus nor asthma and lung photos are Ok. Today my family doctor again checked but didn't see the medical issue, whereas a few days ago, night doctors sent an emergency ambulance for a checkup but also found nothing.
I do not trust the doctors since they made a grave mistake and failed to diagnose metastatic prostate cancer early, and now I am suffering from it.
I am taking four Xtandi tablets of 40 mg per day. As a result, I have short breathing and difficulty breathing; I called several times the hospital assistant of the oncologist, who didn't take it seriously while I searched Google for the reasons and truth; I found the Xtandi link with its side effects that states the breathing difficulties and to contact doctors; it creates anxiety, indeed.
Whatever any suggestions in this regard:
Additional input; however, as a history of black magic by Qadiyyanis followers of fake Jesus that Europe is still unaware of their deeds; I don't exclude the new attacks by them; it is my belief they will face consequences of their crimes accordingly the worldly law and penalty of the Divine.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later.3 Gould subsequently wrote a famous article called “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he argued that his scientific knowledge of statistics saved him from the erroneous conclusion that he would necessarily be dead in eight months.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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It’s like reading cancer statistics once you’ve been diagnosed—they become a source of misplaced encouragement, like reading last night’s box scores. Misery may not love company. But discouragement definitely does. “Would-you-like-to-come-over-on-Thursday-and-have-Thanksgiving-with-me?
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Richard Ford (The Lay of the Land)
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When he was diagnosed with cancer—cancer that doctors told him would be fatal—he decided to drop out of life. Instead of the rat race, he chose to live in the moment, on the fringe of society, taking what he wanted, when he wanted it.
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J.A. Konrath (Shaken (Jack Daniels Book 10))
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If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines. Computers and robots can now build cars, fly planes, fight wars, manage money, represent defendants in court, diagnose cancer, and perform cardiac surgery. As more and more cognitive skills get automated, we’re in the midst of a character revolution. With technological advances placing a premium on interactions and relationships, the skills that make us human are increasingly important to master.
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Adam M. Grant (Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things)
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one of the most helpful things a person can do. Because sharing your feelings with others brings people closer together. It demonstrates an interest in developing an understanding. It demonstrates a caring. Because you have to figure there are some people out there who are going through the same stuff. A friend’s wife was recently diagnosed with cancer and is experiencing a lot of the same things that I’ve been going through. She’s experiencing pain. She’s experiencing fatigue. She’s experiencing depression. And I say, “Oh, thank God I’m not the only one!” If you’re able to, you should share your experiences so that people out there can say, “I’m not alone. There’s somebody else going through the same thing, and they’re bearing up well. Maybe I can also.” If that’s a way for you to inspire people, then there is a lot of merit in that.
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Alex Trebek (The Answer Is…: Reflections on My Life)
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Beatrice, I’ve been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer.
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Katharine McGee (American Royals (American Royals, #1))
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Best Laparoscopic and Laser Urologist, Renal Transplant Surgeon
Dr Shyam Varma has extensive long term experience in diagnosing and treating Kidney Stones, Prostate Enlargement, Prostate Cancer, Kidney Cancer, Bladder Cancer and Incontinence, male infertility and Erectile Dysfunction – Impotence
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Dr Shyam Varma
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Julian was diagnosed with bone cancer in the spring of 1991. The cancer spread quickly and he died of it on August 16 of that year.
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Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
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I have just been diagnosed with breast cancer at age thirty-seven, but I do not have the breast cancer mutation.
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Nina Riggs (The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying)
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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
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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One can imagine a future where you might biobank microbes from your youthful skin in a tube in a freezer, which would become part of your retirement package to boost skin appearance and overall health later in life. This personal biobank could also be useful if you were diagnosed with cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant, or if you suddenly got a C. difficile infection and needed to boost your microbiome at a critical time. We might also see the application of younger persons’ microbes into commercially available products to cultivate the healthful effects of vigorous youthful microbes later in life.
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B. Brett Finlay (The Whole-Body Microbiome: How to Harness Microbes—Inside and Out—for Lifelong Health)
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Naturally, immunity is a natural physician that fends off all invading bacteria and viruses, whereas food becomes its medicine or trouble since that appears to increase or decrease your immune system; thus, choose the right and healthy food, and adopt this proverb: Eat to be alive, not live to eat.
Experienced and qualified doctors understand the side effects of medicines before the prescription. Indeed, the majority of doctors hold a professional degree and certificate, whereas virtually none of them has the latest and accurate knowledge; as a result, it executes no difference between such doctors and a robot.
When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that you have no cancer or whatever other sickness, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in your mind, whereas doctors have diagnosed metastatic cancer.
What should one believe and what not? However, one’s enemies are still awaiting its death. One breathes, expecting and waiting for the miracle of God; it will soon happen if one believes.
You neither feel trust in your family doctor and specialists nor feel satisfaction with their treatment. You always realize that they do not tell the truth about how risky your disease is, and they never discuss it.
If doctors fail to meet your sufferings of mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulties because of medication’s side effects, they will indeed put you on medical victimization, ignoring the better quality of life that the medical system promises.
Most doctors work for the insurance companies instead of caring for patients. It is factually a medical crime that doctors, hospitals, or insurance providers put patients at high risk.
Many doctors do not respect patients’ requests to fulfill it because patients want treatment according to international medical guidelines. Such refusal results in the spreading of their suffering. It saddens patients that the doctors only think about the insurance provider and not the patient.
Indeed, such a situation can put one on the track in a dilemma. However, one’s experience and others may prove that none of the medicines give patients a good quality of life, whether homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even a spiritual one.
If your fate stands as a barrier in front of you, no one sees or realizes what you have faced and is still facing worries about your health.
Factually, robot doctors cannot provide significant information that may help to ease patients’ suffering; there is only one way to change lifestyle and stay strict on diet; it will have a better result than medicine, which is full of toxins that damage patients’ health instead of curing it.
One can think or predict that the medical world has become a medical trade in which one cannot exclude the medical mafia. Is it a valid context that requires an authentic answer?
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Ehsan Sehgal
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In January 2017, doctors diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer; for a while, I was shocked to hear that since I went to the urologist in 2016 for the entire year, the doctor did not consider it seriously that I had bleeding in my urine and burning.
Consequently, I became a victim of chronic cancer, and doctors cannot cure it; treatment only can prolong life. However, I am a true believer that miracles can cure every disease with the grace of Allah.
In that situation, I started to write my autobiography and completed it in a few months. Waseem Malik, the editor-in-chief of Daily Dharti, published that in its online news portal.
The characters that caused me distress, harassment, and criminal attempts to gain their immoral and ugly motives are still busy practicing such activities.
I cannot believe such mindless criminals and scoundrels, with fake female names on their profiles, try to victimize sincere people.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Many of the verbal expressions that cause people to be detained on "mental health" grounds are — should be — protected speech. People who say things considered incomprehensible or illogical by the police or "mental health" workers are given ostensibly medical diagnoses and imprisoned for a limited time. That is, people who speak in a way those in authority disapprove of are punished, even if the speaker breaks no law. This blatant and often exercised limit on free speech is a "for your own good" exception to the First Amendment. There should be no such exception. But it is so woven into the fabric of American society and jurisprudence that virtually nobody objects. You can refuse a lifesaving treatment for cancer, but you cannot refuse to be jailed for saying something like, "I am Jesus" to the police when they are doing a "welfare check," a euphemism if there ever was one.
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Thomas Stephen Szasz
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Fifteen years after being diagnosed with cancer, I’ve become something I never imagined I’d be. I’m a survivor.
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Alice Hoffman (Survival Lessons)
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Prevention Plain and simple, cancer cannot live in an alkaline and oxygenated environment. That’s it! Cancer loves acidity, sugar (which is highly acidic), and less oxygenated places in the body, to grow and develop. When a person is diagnosed with cancer of any kind and if time is not of the essence to treat it, a three-month regime of organic alkaline nutrition and oxygenation under professional supervision would be ideal to return the body to health or reduce the severity of cancer. This may be something to consult a naturopathic physician or qualified health professional about. Keep in mind that there are places where people who were considered terminally ill have gone for treatment and left weeks later cancer-free. This is a fact.
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Ron Baron (Confronting Radiation Fibrosis: A Cancer Survivor's Handbook (A Basic Understanding))
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a 2010 study of Swedish women revealed that those who took multivitamins were 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer over a ten-year period than those who didn’t.
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David B. Agus (The End of Illness)
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There is that one burning question we all want to know the answer to, but, may be too afraid to ask. What are my chances of surviving this diagnosis? It seemed like every web site gave me a different answer. They put a number in my mind and in hind sight, the number in my mind should have been 100…..100% chance of my survival…nothing less! Never let statistics get in your head. You are an individual, not a number, and you will make your way through this with your own strength and grace.
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Michele Ryan (Cancer: What I Wish I Had Known When I Was First Diagnosed: Tips and Advice From a Survivor)
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Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Matt?” I ask. And I really want to know, because it’s unfathomable to me that he’s single. He’s handsome, and he’s so kind. He shakes a finger at me. “There’s a story there,” he says. I settle into the sofa a little deeper and turn so that my feet are pointed toward him, my legs extended. My toes almost touch his thigh. But then he lifts my feet and slides under them, scooting closer to me. “I was in love with a girl. For a long time.” “What happened to her?” I ask. He starts to tickle across my toes, and then his fingertips drag down the top of my foot. It’s a gentle sweep, and it feels so good that I don’t want him to stop. His fingers play absently as he starts to talk. “When I got the diagnosis,” he says, “she couldn’t deal with it.” “Cancer?” I ask. He nods. His fingers drag up and down my shin, and he slides around to stroke the back of my knee. I don’t stop him when his hand slides beneath my skirt, although I do tense up. He smiles when he finds the top of my thigh-highs, and he unclips the little fastener that attaches them to my garters. He repeats the action on the other side, his hands teasing the sensitive skin of my inner thigh as he frees the stocking and rolls it down. He pulls it all the way over my foot, and does the same with the other side. I am suddenly really glad I shaved my legs this morning. I wiggle my toes at him, and he starts to stroke me again. I don’t ever want him to stop. “This okay?” he asks. But he’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my legs. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Keep talking. You got diagnosed…” “I got diagnosed, and the prognosis wasn’t good. I went through chemo and got a little better. But then I needed a second round. Things didn’t look good, and we were flat broke. I couldn’t work at the tattoo parlor anymore because my immune system was too weak, so I had no money coming in. I was poor and sick, and she didn’t love me enough to walk the path with me.” He shrugs, but I can tell he’s serious. “She cheated with my best friend.” He shrugs again. “And that’s the end of that sad story.” “You still love her?” I ask. I don’t breathe, waiting for his answer. He shakes his head and looks up. “I did love her for a long time. And I haven’t been looking for a relationship. I haven’t dated anyone since her. But I’m not in love with her anymore. I know that now.” “Why now?” I ask. He looks directly into my eyes and says, “Because I met you, and I feel really hopeful that you’ll want to go after something real with me. I know we just met and all, but I was serious about making you fall in love with me.” He laughs. “Then you hit me in the nose tonight, and I knew it was meant to be.” “What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. “When my brother Logan met Emily, she punched him in the face. And when Pete and Reagan first started dating, she hit him in the nose.” He reaches up and touches his nose gently. “So, when you hit me tonight, I just knew it was meant to be.” He grins. “I hope you feel the same way, because I really want to see where this thing is going to go.” “So the women your brothers fell in love with, they committed bodily harm to them and that’s how you guys knew it was real?” “We kind of have a rule. If a woman punches you in the face, you have to marry her.” He laughs. “I didn’t punch you.” “Same difference,” he says. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
”
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Tammy Falkner (Maybe Matt's Miracle (The Reed Brothers, #4))
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If you are newly diagnosed, experiencing a recurrence, or caring for someone with brain cancer, I urge you to dig in, carry on, and fortify yourself with the knowledge that personal growth may, in fact, be obtained throughout this challenge. When
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Mindy Elwell (Defy & Conquer: A State Of Mind Against Terminal Brain Cancer)
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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.
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Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)
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Jimmy Valvano was a legendary college basketball coach and broadcaster. In June of 1992, he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. In March of the following year, Jimmy gave a powerful speech at the first ever ESPY awards, presented by ESPN. His message was just as simple as it was moving: “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” Eight weeks later, he passed away. In his speech, he also said this: To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears―could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special. And finally, this: Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever. There is no other reason to be alive than to enjoy it. So laugh, think, cry. Work hard. Celebrate your victories. Embrace the day. And don’t ever give up.
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Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)
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The surgeon also reminded me that I had no family history of breast cancer. Only later would I learn that 80 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history of the disease. I
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Susan Parris (Cancer Mom: Hearing God in an Unknown Journey)
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My wondrous world of writing collapsed when my schizophrenic brother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
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Jean Lufkin Bouler (Exploring Florida's Emerald Coast: A Rich History and a Rare Ecology)
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Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously.
Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health.
“The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease.
For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life.
“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of.
A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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Jack Adkisson was more than a great athlete and professional wrestler. He was a very wonderful and kind man as well. After the doctors diagnosed Fritz with terminal cancer, he gave me some irreplaceable photos and videos. When I would not accept any compensation for the help I gave him during his illness, he said, “Why don’t you write a book about me, from me, to all my fans around the world like you, Ron, and let everyone hear the Von Erich story from me.
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Ron Mullinax
“
She died in hospital, eight months after she was diagnosed and treated for Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes. For a week before that, she asked me to read aloud her favourite poems. She listened, her eyes closed. Now and then she repeated a line softly to herself. That fateful day, as I sat at her bedside, she asked me to read from a volume of Christina Rossetti’s poems. As I read, she opened her eyes, smiled and said, clearly and distinctly, ‘And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.’
Those were her last words.
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Poile Sengupta (Inga)
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Brain and mood disorders, migraines, osteoporosis, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory disorders, and cancer are rampant. Grains are rarely suspected as the original culprit, though every one of these disorders, among many more, can potentially be traced to often insidious gluten intolerance. Gluten sensitivity is only rarely obvious to the afflicted, and many people are even entirely surprised to learn they have this sensitivity. I know I was. Only an estimated 1 percent of all gluten sensitivity or celiac disease is ever diagnosed.
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Nora T. Gedgaudas (Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond Paleo for Total Health and a Longer Life)
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Let us be reminded that it is hard to feel overwhelmed when you are in familiar territory. It is easy to be overwhelmed when you are on unfamiliar ground no one wants to traverse.
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Kevin P. Ryan (When Tumor Is the Rumor and Cancer Is the Answer:A comprehensive text for newly diagnosed cancer patients and their families)
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I truly believe that the children who are diagnosed with cancer are some of the wisest, sweetest, strongest, and most loving children. They have gained a bigger perspective of the world in such a short time. They become wise beyond their years.
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Laura Lane (Two Mothers, One Prayer: Facing your Child's Cancer with Hope, Strength, and Courage)
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If Asher was still here, would I have ever had a chance with you?”... “Wait, don’t answer that. We’re supposed to be moving forward.”
“Do you ever give much thought to coincidences?”
"No,"
“Like, if my mom hadn’t decided to move to Carrington, I would never have met you. If she hadn’t picked the house next to yours, we wouldn’t have been so close. Life is mapped out by a series of choices and coincidences … miracles and fate are figments of a dreamer’s imagination. If Drew hadn’t hurt me, I think we’d be together just like we are now, but I appreciate you so much more because of the journey we took to get here. If Asher hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer, he wouldn’t have come to Carrington, and I would never have met him. It was our situations that brought us together so to answer your question, I don’t think it was ever possible for Asher to be my forever. That’s not the map that was laid out for either of us … I honestly believe he was meant to lead me back to you.” She pauses, kissing me softly. “I was always meant to be with you.
”
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Lisa De Jong (After the Rain (Rains, #1.5))
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To get the most out of this chapter, first find where you are on this map of the cancer journey: Critical stress points. When you have just been diagnosed with cancer or learned that your cancer has recurred or is not responding to treatment. Treatment preparation. When you are anticipating surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or molecular target therapies. Side effect management. When you are undergoing treatment and need ways (instead of or in addition to drugs) to manage its side effects. Post-treatment. When you are adjusting to the end of active treatment, usually after the final chemotherapy cycle. This situation can, perhaps surprisingly, prove quite stressful. Remission maintenance. Although definitely good news, remission introduces its own issues, most notably fear of recurrence. Remission is also when you will be most determined to take back your life from cancer.
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Keith Block (Life Over Cancer: The Block Center Program for Integrative Cancer Treatment)
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When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I learned the word "malignant" and heard the word "spread" and knew the word "hope" was a mirage, a fantasy that would only make things worse. But then I learned the word "remission," and the doctors loosened their ties, cracked bad jokes (said her blood type was B-positive, so we should be optimistic, too), and they increased the odds of her survival to fifty-fifty, like she was something to wager on in Vegas. I slept well and ate well and celebrated on the inside. My kidneys shook pom-poms, my liver did an Irish jig, my small intestines did the worm. The future was bright with a likely chance of sunshine--and then it was over.
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Matt Blackstone (Sorry You're Lost)
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(Actually, to diagnose cancer, doctors give patients radioactive sugar. The sugar then goes straight to the cancer, and it lights up on the PET scan.)
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Rick Warren (The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life)
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My first three years went by without a problem, until my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I had to stop going to help take care of her. Because I had taken a break from school, it caused me to lose my scholarship.
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Myiesha (A New Jersey Love Story: Troy & Camilla)
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Live a little Connor, life is too short," I said as i stared out into the moonlit water. He sighed and sat down next to me.
We sat in silence for a moment, and I was feeling somewhat emotional; I'm blaming the wine, when I started to speak.
"It was my sixteenth birthday when I was diagnosed with cancer." I felt him look at me as I just stared ahead listening to the whispers of the ocean. "Hey, happy sweet sixteen, guess what, you have cancer." I felt the tears starting to sting my eyes.
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Sandi Lynn (Forever Black (Forever, #1))
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Farren had discovered before she traveled back to her home in Jersey that Ashley had been diagnosed with stage three stomach cancer and it was pretty aggressive.
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Nako (The Connect's Wife 5)
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For the hardest problems—the ones we really want to solve but haven’t been able to, like curing cancer—pure nature-inspired approaches are probably too uninformed to succeed, even given massive amounts of data. We can in principle learn a complete model of a cell’s metabolic networks by a combination of structure search, with or without crossover, and parameter learning via backpropagation, but there are too many bad local optima to get stuck in. We need to reason with larger chunks, assembling and reassembling them as needed and using inverse deduction to fill in the gaps. And we need our learning to be guided by the goal of optimally diagnosing cancer and finding the best drugs to cure it. Optimal learning is the Bayesians’ central goal, and they are in no doubt that they’ve figured out how to reach it. This way, please …
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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DNA will be stored by the clinic or government. Why not screen the baby before it’s born? Advances in genetic technology allow embryos to be screened for hundreds of genetic risk factors, including Down syndrome, breast cancer, and sickle-cell anemia, using nothing but a blood sample from the mother. Parents who desire the ideal baby, and nothing less, will go for that. Already companies are offering services from pre-implantation diagnoses to direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Genetic technology will impact our emotions and values. Some parents see genetic optimization as a great possibility and a basic right; others are morally appalled by the thought of designer babies. One thing we can be sure of is that genetic screening will lead to more abortions. Moreover, if parents decide
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Gerd Gigerenzer (Risk Savvy: How To Make Good Decisions)
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Along the bottom of each chart, the x-axis, the doctors plotted the number of ACEs that patients had experienced. Along the y-axis, they indicated the prevalence of a specific undesirable outcome: obesity, depression, early sexual activity, history of smoking, and so on. On each chart, the bars rose steadily and consistently from left (0 ACEs) to right (more than 7 ACEs). Compared to people with no history of ACEs, people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis.
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Paul Tough (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character)
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Since it was my first visit with Dr. Knapp, he sat with me in his office before examining me. He wanted to know my family history. He has a warm, easygoing nature that put me at ease. It felt as if he had been my doctor for years. Again, I did not mention the real reason why I was there. Later, I was surprised to learn that 80 percent of people diagnosed with breast cancer have no prior family history. Eighty percent! It makes you wonder why there’s so much attention paid to disclosing prior family history.
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Robin Roberts (Everybody's Got Something)
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Slow It Down God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. Genesis 1:5 by T. Suzanne Eller Everyone knows morning comes first, and then evening. Right? So I was surprised to read in Genesis 1:5 that the order was, in fact, reversed: “And there was evening, and there was morning.” God started with evening, a time of rest, and a day followed, in which he continued to create. We live in a culture where we work all day, and then eventually we might take time to rest. To order our days the way God does—with rest as a priority—is a challenge. I learned to prioritize God’s way when, at age 32, I was diagnosed with cancer. I told the doctor I didn’t have time for cancer, but cancer didn’t consult my schedule. My life changed while going through treatment as I put aside activities that previously had seemed vital. Out of that difficult time came a new list of priorities. At the top of the list: to balance my life. I learned to climb between the sheets and put aside my worries—to rest my body and mind. To slow down when life became crazy and assess what is important. I began to see evening as the first part of my day. This concept changed my life, physically and spiritually. Recently I had two speaking events sandwiched together. As the dates approached, time with my heavenly Father became “evening.” In preparation for my events, I listened to the heart of my Father instead of going over my notes. Out of that rest sprang fruitful ministry during the day. Learning to live with evening, or rest, as a top priority is an ongoing process. Many times I ask God to help me reprioritize, make time for physical rest and put “evening” back where it belongs. More Verses to Explore: Exodus 20:11 Psalm 91:1 Mark 6:30–31
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Lysa TerKeurst (NIV, Real-Life Devotional Bible for Women: Insights for Everyday Life)
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After finding out that I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, I knew I had to make it my business to have a better relationship with my daughter.
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Diamond D. Johnson (A Miami Love Tale 3 : Thugs Need Luv Too)
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one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer—and the other seven will know her.
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Susan Wiggs (Return to Willow Lake (The Lakeshore Chronicles #9))
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The patient in question was a young woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer.
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Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
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Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” —Joshua 1:9 (NIV) Tomorrow I’m going in for one of my regular cancer tests, and today I’m fighting my “What if” fears. What if my cancer comes back? I’m nearly seven years out from being diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer when I was given a two-year life expectancy. I’ve beaten all odds. But a couple of doctors told me that “stage IV ovarian cancer always comes back.” So far, I’ve proven them wrong, but every time I make an appointment for a checkup, the “What if” fears start creeping in. What if my test is not good? “Don’t go there,” a friend advises me. But I have to go there. My way of dealing with my fears is to look the worst-case possibilities square in the face. I’ve even created my own scenario for this fear-facing exercise. I imagine my fears stuffed into an imaginary room. It’s a scary but sacred place, because I know that nothing in that room surprises God—and He invites me to “go there” because Jesus is there too. He walks alongside me as I explore each fear, imagining what my life would be like if that worst possibility became a reality. What if my cancer comes back? I picture Jesus answering, “If your cancer comes back, I will still be with you. I will still give you what you need, one day at a time. I will still love you with an everlasting love. And I will still give you a future with hope.” Soon, I know that even if my worst fears become reality, Jesus’ promises are still true. That gives me courage as I go off to my cancer test once again. Lord, Your promises sustain me. Always. —Carol Kuykendall Digging Deeper: Prv 1:33; Phil 4:19; 2 Pt 1:1–11
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
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However, Pauling’s interest in these carotenoids and flavonoids was confined to their chemical structures and the influence of structure on optical properties; he did not address their health functions. In 1941 Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, or glomerulonephritis, which was at the time an often-fatal kidney disorder. On the advice of physicians at the Rockefeller Institute, he went to San Francisco for treatment by Thomas Addis, an innovative Stanford nephrologist. Addis prescribed a diet low in salt and protein, plenty of water, and supplementary vitamins and minerals that Pauling followed for nearly 14 years and completely recovered. This was dramatic firsthand experience of the therapeutic value of the diet. Revelations When Pauling cast about for a new research direction in the 1950s, he realized that mental illness was a significant public health problem that had not been sufficiently addressed by scientists. Perhaps his mother’s megaloblastic madness and premature death caused by B12 deficiency underlay this interest. At about this time, Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., began a residency in psychiatry, which undoubtedly prompted Pauling to consider the nature of mental illness. Thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation, Pauling investigated the role of enzymes in brain function but made little progress. When he came across a copy of Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry (1962) by Abram Hoffer in 1965, Pauling was astonished to learn that simple substances needed in minute amounts to prevent deficiency diseases could have therapeutic application in unrelated diseases when given in very large amounts. This serendipitous and key event was critically responsible for Pauling’s seminal paper in his emergent medical field. Later, Pauling was especially excited by Hoffer’s observations on the survival of patients with advanced cancer who responded well to his micronutrient and dietary regimen, originally formulated to help schizophrenics manage their illness.19,20 The regimen includes large doses of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. About 40 percent of patients treated adjunctively with Hoffer’s regimen lived, on average, five or more years, and about 60 percent survived four times longer than controls. These results were even better than those achieved by Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron, Pauling’s close clinical collaborator, in Scotland. After a long and extremely productive career at Caltech,
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Andrew W. Saul (Orthomolecular Treatment of Chronic Disease: 65 Experts on Therapeutic and Preventive Nutrition)
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When Papa’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and his daddy couldn’t deal with the death of his wife, he killed himself in front of Papa. It was safe to say Papa hadn’t been the same since. Andre,
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Nako (Pointe Of No Return: Giving You All I Got (The Underworld Book 2))
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She was diagnosed with leukemia when Lily was six months old.... Diana and I had looked at each other, no clue, nowhere to begin, certainly no answers, other than the largest answer, that is, the answer that emerged in how, despite or maybe in lieu of the terror of the situation, our bodies had involuntarily gravitated toward each other, how our petty grudges and growing disagreements—all the fissures and loggerheads that had been emerging in our marriage—had given way.
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Charles Bock
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You may consider me as a sentimental one or a realistic one since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies have the capability, to develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second 2016, first caused esophagus damage and stomach hernia and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write the report about that. Such refusal created in my mind doubts that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role to damage and destroy my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath Miriam Sommer in The Hague, after a month discussing she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage, and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue, to suck, I did that; however, later I became suspicious, why she did that? -
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check up that I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked, and consequently, February 2017, they diagnose as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet the International Medical Guidelines, they let the patient suffering from the disease and treat it with a gravely cheap way, paying no proper care and attention. I am unaware of others' experiences in this regard.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage, and destruction of career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as my guidelines before criminals disappear that can lead to a positive result. Otherwise, I will be right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
- Ehsan Sehgal
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
breast cancer is a pandemic concern, and the numbers sure prove it. In the United States alone, 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lives.
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Kristi Funk (Breasts: The Owner's Manual: Every Woman's Guide to Reducing Cancer Risk, Making Treatment Choices, and Optimizing Outcomes)
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Skin Goals clinic
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If I was diagnosed with cancer, I would immediately start taking at least 50,000 IU of D3 per day and I recommend this to anyone else. There will be no Big Pharma study on high dose D3 for cancer as it is not patentable, and they cannot make any money from it.
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Jeff T. Bowles (The Miraculous Cure For and Prevention of All Diseases What Doctors Never Learned)
“
There was a brief moment, in the run-up to the 2016 election, when many prominent Republicans stood firmly opposed to Trump. Ezra Klein writes: Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was “a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” Rand Paul said Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Marco Rubio called him “dangerous” and warned that we should not hand “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.” 63 But once it was clear the tide was turning, nearly all major Republicans—including Cruz, Perry, Paul, and Rubio—pulled a 180 and backed Trump.
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Tim Urban (What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies)
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Eating cruciferous vegetables produces measurable isothiocyanates in breast tissue,2 and observational studies show that women who eat more cruciferous vegetables are less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.
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Doug Evans (The Sprout Book: Tap into the Power of the Planet's Most Nutritious Food)
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been diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer seventeen years ago and only given weeks to live, but she was still here and was now cancer-free.
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Caroline Finnerty (A Sister's Promise)
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You must keep this in mind whenever you read such diagnoses as ‘cancer,’ or ‘emphysema,’ or ‘arteriosclerosis’ as the cause of a patient’s death. They may have been a cause leading to death, but as to the direct cause of death—that, my friends, remains a mystery in the vast majority of cases.
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Michael Palmer (The Sisterhood)
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Now move forward. It is not in death we should be afraid. It is in life, if we don’t live it. It is a gift.
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Arlene M. Karole (Just Diagnosed: Breast Cancer)
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In January 2017, doctors diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer; for a while, I was shocked to hear that since I went to the urologist in 2016 for the entire year, the doctor did not consider it seriously that I had bleeding in my urine and burning.
Consequently, I became a victim of chronic cancer, and doctors cannot cure it; treatment only can prolong life. However, I am a true believer that miracles can cure every disease with the grace of Allah.
In that situation, I started to write my autobiography and completed it in a few months. Waseem Malik, the editor-in-chief of Daily Dharti, published that in its online news portal.
The characters that caused me distress, harassment, and criminal attempts to gain their immoral and ugly motives are still busy practicing such activities.
I cannot believe such mindless criminals and scoundrels, with fake female names on their profiles, try to victimize sincere people.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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Those who are diagnosed at an early stage and are in a localized area may be cured.
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DR. XAN XAI (HEALING LUNG CANCER : Your Ultimate Solution Guide To Learn And Understand Everything You Need To Survive, Cope, Prevent, Strive, Reverse Disease And Take Your Health Back To Normal)
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You may consider me sentimental or realistic since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies can develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second in 2016, first causing esophagus damage and stomach hernia, and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried for years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write a report about that. Such refusal created doubts in my mind that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role in damaging and destroying my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath, Miriam Sommer, in The Hague; after a month's discussion, she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue to suck, and I did that. However, later I became suspicious of why she did do that.
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check what I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked it, and consequently, in February 2017, they diagnosed as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet International Medical Guidelines; they let the patients suffering from the disease and treat them in a gravely poor way, paying no proper care and attention. In this regard, I am unaware of others' experiences.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage and the destruction of my career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as guidelines before criminals disappear, can lead to a positive result; otherwise, I am right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Sometimes, I don’t feel I have strength. Some days, I feel broken. I feel I can’t do it for another day. I remember thinking to myself one time, maybe shouting it out loud when I was newly diagnosed, and I was running. I was out for a run. “I cannot do it!” She has times when she doesn’t feel strong and only feels broken inside. Who doesn’t have that? However, when the person surrenders to those states, they sometimes bounce back immediately.
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Morhaf Al Achkar (ROADS TO MEANING AND RESILIENCE WITH CANCER: Forty Stories of Coping, Finding Meaning, and Building Resilience While Living with Incurable Lung Cancer)
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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.
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Axton Betz-Hamilton (The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity)
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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.
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Axton Betz-Hamilton (The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity)
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马里兰大学学院公园分校毕业文凭【微信Q86013792】在线办理国外毕业证成绩单University of Maryland, College Park美国【真实留信认证】wse认证【国外原版证书文凭】offer入取通知书办理I have been a caregiver many times over the years. In October 2019, my then 90 year old Mother In Law was diagnosed with Stage IV Breast Cancer. She came to live with us and stayed until she died in April, 2021 at age 92. We did chemo and radiation and ended with Hospice.
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马里兰大学学院公园分校毕业文凭
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Hereditary is a myth unless it has to do with skin, eye, and hair color and appearance. No illnesses are hereditary as you will hear doctors say when one of their patients gets diagnosed with a disease.
I always explain it like this, if your parents smoked around you in the house and car while you grew up and then they ended up with lung cancer, your doctor will tell you that you are likely to inherit the same disease.
This explanation can also be applied to the air, water, and food that your parents provided you with when you were growing up, which a lot of times, are the same types of food and drinks as your grandparents provided to your parents when they were kids.
So, as you can see, what is referred to as hereditary has more to do with the air you breathe, what you drink, and the food you consume and very little to do with hereditary. Hippocrates knew this but the American Medical Association (AMA) doesn't want you nor their doctors to know.
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James Thomas Kesterson Jr
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A recent report in the New York Times highlighted the intense pressure on Amazon’s white-collar employees, those working on software, product development, and marketing. Employees faced “annual cullings,” often based on anonymous feedback from colleagues, who were all competing against each other; they openly wept in the office under the pressure; facing a boss described as an “insatiable taskmaster,” some employees worked for days without sleeping. Perhaps most troubling were the reports of employees in deep personal distress, facing family crises or even cancer diagnoses, who were given little to no flexibility and faced serious repercussions for their corresponding shortcomings.
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Steve Hilton (More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First)
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I had several reasons for writing this book. First and foremost was to tell the story of Donna’s courageous battle against triple-negative breast cancer. Moreover, I felt writing would help me deal with my profound grief following the loss of my wife, soul mate and best friend.
Furthermore, I sought to increase awareness about this form of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer affects less than 20 percent of all breast cancer patients. Triple-negative breast cancer is more aggressive and difficult to treat than other forms of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer is also more likely to spread beyond the breast and be fatal within five years.
It is my hope that this book will be helpful for caregivers who find themselves looking after a loved one who is fighting this terrible disease! When Donna was diagnosed, I had no idea what that entailed or what I needed to do to support her. I learned on the fly, made mistakes along the way, and witnessed how vital a caregiver’s support can be.
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John Charles Corrigan (Love Always: My Wife’s Courageous Battle Against Triple-Negative Breast Cancer)
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Approximately two million people go into perimenopause each year in the United States alone. Only a fraction of that number (around 15 percent) are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States every year. Fewer people have heart attacks and strokes here annually than go into perimenopause. How do all of us—you, me, our mothers, healthcare providers, the ladies on The View—usually know so much less about something so much more common, something that will absolutely happen to everyone born with a uterus and ovaries in some way at some point, most often as an unavoidable part of the life cycle, than we do about things less common that are only, and frequently even avoidable, maybes?
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Heather Corinna (What Fresh Hell Is This?: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You)
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In 1987 the psychologist Dr. Lydia Temoshok[*] proposed what became known as the “type C personality,” referring to traits strongly associated with the onset of malignancy.[*] These couldn’t have been further from the type A traits on the temperamental spectrum; they included being “cooperative and appeasing, unassertive, patient, unexpressive of negative emotions (particularly anger) and compliant with external authorities.” She had interviewed 150 people with melanoma and found these patients to be “excessively nice, pleasant to a fault, uncomplaining and unassertive.” They were identified “pleasers”: while anxious about their disease progression, their worries were focused in a specifically outward direction, away from themselves and toward the effect that their illness was having on their families. Such self-abnegation was too well typified in an article I once read in the Globe and Mail, written by a woman just diagnosed with breast cancer. “I’m worried about my husband,” she immediately told her physician. “I won’t have the strength to support him.”[7] Around the same time, about ten years into my medical practice, I was beginning to notice similar patterns in the lives of many of my patients, folks with all manner of illnesses. This, despite my lack of familiarity at the time with the voluminous research that in the past half century has shed light on how stress, including the stress of self-suppression, may disturb our physiology, including the immune system.
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Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
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Dr. Sims believes this country needs more inpatient treatment space and to approach mental health diagnoses the way we do cancer. Just as we have specialists and advanced facilities devoted to specific types of cancer, he believes we need doctors, nurses, and aides who work together in teams focused on a specific problem of the mind.
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Antonia Hylton (Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum)
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He got one every couple of years until being diagnosed with lung cancer.” “I’m sorry.” Colton said. “It’s not your fault,” Wendy said. “Shit happens, as Bill used to say.” Colton chuckled. “Very true.” “Bill started getting tattoos again after his diagnosis.
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E.M. Kelly (Murder By Symbols)
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incidence. Exposure to natural or manmade radioisotopes also occurs during cancer radiotherapy, whereas the radioactive compounds iodine-131 and technetium-99m are exploited to diagnose and treat benign and malignant thyroid diseases
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Anonymous
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PATIENT PROFILE: S.R. was diagnosed at age 48 with stage 4 non-Hodgkins B-cell lymphoma. Tumor was the size of a potato and choking off blood to the intestines. Underwent chemo regimen. S.R. used nutrition supplements in spite of oncologist’s hostility to the subject. S.R. was able to work throughout chemo, travelling to trade shows, though he did lose his hair. As of 2005, S.R. is in complete remission and has learned the value of good nutrition, living more joyfully, and faith in God.
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Patrick Quillin (Beating Cancer with Nutrition: Optimal Nutrition Can Improve Outcome inMedically-Treated Cancer Patients.: Clinically Proven and Easy-to-follow Strategies ... Life and Chances for a Complete Remission)
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As we become ever more insulin-resistant and glucose-intolerant, as our blood sugar gets higher along with our insulin levels, as our blood pressure elevates and we get ever fatter, we are more likely to be diagnosed as diabetic and manifest the diseases and conditions that associate with diabetes. These include not just heart disease, gout, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the cluster of Western diseases that Burkitt and Trowell included in their provisional list, but all the conditions typically perceived as complications of diabetes: blood-vessel (vascular) complications that lead to strokes, dementia, and kidney disease; retinopathy (blindness) and cataracts; neuropathies (nerve disorders); plaque deposits in the arteries of the heart (leading to heart attacks) or the legs and feet (leading to amputations); accumulation of advanced glycation end products, AGEs, in the collagen of our skin that can make diabetics look prematurely old, and that in joints, arteries, and the heart and lungs can cause the loss of elasticity as we age. It’s this premature aging of the skin, arteries, and joints that has led some diabetes researchers to think of the disease as a form of accelerated aging. But increasing our risk of contracting all these other chronic conditions means we’re also likely to get these ailments at ever-younger ages and thus, effectively, age faster.
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Gary Taubes (The Case Against Sugar)
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One example of this damage occurs when ill-informed physicians diagnose brown recluse spider bites as the cause of skin lesions in areas of the continent where recluse spiders of any species are exceedingly rare or have never been found. When the quantity of brown recluse bite diagnoses greatly outnumbers the verified specimens of recluse spiders in a particular area, it logically follows that the spiders cannot be responsible for all these incidents. Some of these misdiagnosed skin conditions, such as cancer, lymphoma, group A Streptococcus bacterial infection, and Lyme disease, can cause great suffering, irreversible damage, and possibly death. When a wrong diagnosis is made, spider bite treatment is ineffective and the correct treatment is delayed or never given.
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Richard S. Vetter (The Brown Recluse Spider)
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The Times ad marked a seminal intersection in the history of cancer. With it, cancer declared its final emergence from the shadowy interiors of medicine into the full glare of public scrutiny, morphing into an illness of national and international prominence. This was a generation that no longer whispered about cancer. There was cancer in newspapers and cancer in books, cancer in theater and in films: in 450 articles in the New York Times in 1971; in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a blistering account of a cancer hospital in the Soviet Union; in Love Story, a 1970 film about a twenty-four-year-old woman who dies of leukemia; in Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 release about a baseball catcher diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; in Brian's Song, the story of the Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, who died of testicular cancer. A torrent of op-ed pieces and letters appeared in newspapers and magazines.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
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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.
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Ty M. Bollinger (The Truth about Cancer: What You Need to Know about Cancer's History, Treatment, and Prevention)
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Patients diagnosed with cancer and treated with our multisdisciplinary approaches are knocked down physically and emotionally, but they pick themselves up off the canvas and struggle on. They carry the reminders of the acute and chronic side effects from cytotoxic chemotheraly and radiation-induced skin and functional-organ changes. They endure the scars, complications and impairments imposed by the blades of surgical oncologists like me. Though sometimes they want to, they don't leave. They remain. They maintain. I respect the effort, the invincible spirit, and the patients, who don't give a damn about the odds or probabilities, they are going out swinging. We are tag-team partners in oncology, entering the ring to attack cancer with every move and method we know. Hell, I'll even throw a few chairs if it will help.
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Steven A. Curley (In My Hands: Compelling Stories from a Surgeon and His Patients Fighting Cancer)
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myeloma is one of the most dreaded cancers. It is practically incurable even with aggressive medical treatment. As myeloma cells take over the bone marrow, healthy white blood cells continue to decline in number, which increases your susceptibility to infection. Reduced levels of red blood cells can lead to anemia, and reduced platelet counts can lead to serious bleeding. Once diagnosed, most people survive fewer than five years.25 Multiple myeloma does not occur out of the blue. It appears to be nearly always preceded by a precancerous
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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When Marian was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the Jordans in essence retired and closed the hall closet for good. She died on April 7, 1961. Jim lived to be 91, succumbing on a date in 1988 that seems appropriate for one of radio’s best jokers: April 1st.
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Clair Schulz (FIBBER McGEE & MOLLY ON THE AIR, 1935-1959 (REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION))
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Can Strawberries Reverse the Development of Esophageal Cancer? Esophageal cancer joins pancreatic cancer as one of the gravest diagnoses imaginable. The five-year survival rate is less than 20 percent,124 with most people dying within the first year after diagnosis.125 This underscores the need to prevent, stop, or reverse the disease process as early as possible. Researchers decided to put berries to the test. In a randomized clinical trial of powdered strawberries in patients with precancerous lesions in their esophagus, subjects ate one to two ounces of freeze-dried strawberries every day for six months—that’s the daily equivalent of about a pound of fresh strawberries.126 All of the study participants started out with either mild or moderate precancerous disease, but, amazingly, the progression of the disease was reversed in about 80 percent of the patients in the high-dose strawberry group. Most of these precancerous lesions either regressed from moderate to mild or disappeared entirely. Half of those on the high-dose strawberry treatment walked away disease-free.127
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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It’s never too late to take stock of one’s work, relationships, and life. What dreams of yours are unfulfilled, and why have they been pushed aside? Sometimes circumstances or economics are the unavoidable roadblock to achieving your dreams.
When things are outside of a person’s control, all one can do is to evaluate how best to deal with these obstacles, and then take action. That was my personal approach when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The best thing about my cancer was that I realized how many people cared about me and wanted to help. I am not very good at asking for help and, unfortunately, many people are the same. Family and friends are a grossly underrated asset, which is why I centered my debut novel, To Tuscany with Love, on a group of friends who help each other save, and forgive, themselves.
A surprising occurrence is that sometimes we ourselves, like my characters, have become the obstruction to achieving our goals. Passionately investing in your relationships and dreams is the first step to molding yourself into the person you dream of being and in the process, achieving happiness and fulfillment.
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Gail Mencini
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When I was initially diagnosed with cancer, I questioned God's reasoning for giving me such a debilitating disease. But then it dawned on me: He chose me to give this disease because He knew that I could handle it!
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Brett M. Cordes (Cancer Is for Older People: How Young Minds Beat an Old Disease)
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Sometimes I think of my death,’ wrote Kurosawa, ‘I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.’ The story of a man diagnosed with stomach cancer, Kurosawa’s film is a serious contemplation of the nature of existence and the question of how we find meaning in our lives.
Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character’s stomach, Ikiru, tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frentic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe - the film’s hero, finally finds satisfaction through building a children’s playground.
In this, the role of his career, Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a senior civil servant sunk in ossified routine - a man who, as the dispassionate narrator tells us, has lived like a corpse for twenty-five years. Confronted with the news that he has terminal cancer with only months to live, he finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life.
This was one of Kurosawa’s own favourites among his films. It grew, he said, out of a sense of his own mortality. Although he was only 42 and had yet to make most of his finest films, he was tormented with doubts about what his own life would be worth, saying, ‘I keep feeling I have lived so little. My heart aches with this feeling.’ From this angle, the film can be seen as a form of therapy, Kurosawa reassuring himself, and us, that life *can* be made to have meaning, even under the shadow of imminent death. As the critic Richard Brown wrote, Ikiru ‘consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when all’s said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which is meaningful *to him*. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.
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Philip Kemp
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Yet from 1975 to 2007, breast cancer rates increased by one-third and prostate cancer rates soared by 50 percent. Widespread screening with mammography and the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test played a significant role in detecting these cases, making direct comparisons difficult. Still, we clearly have a problem. Almost 1.6 million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2011.12 When have Americans ever waged such a long, drawn-out, and costly war, with no end in sight?
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Margaret I. Cuomo (A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention)
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.
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Nina Shapiro (Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice—How to Tell What's Real and What's Not)
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the case of Nelene Fox. Fox was from Temecula, California, and was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 1991, when she was thirty-eight years old. Surgery and conventional chemotherapy failed, and the cancer spread to her bone marrow. The disease was terminal. Doctors at the University of Southern California offered her a radical but seemingly promising new treatment—high-dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation. To Fox, it was her one chance of cure. Her insurer, Health Net, denied her request for coverage of the costs, arguing that it was an experimental treatment whose benefits were unproven and that it was therefore excluded under the terms of her policy. The insurer pressed her to get a second opinion from an Independent medical center. Fox refused—who were they to tell her to get another opinion? Her life was at stake. Raising $212,000 through charitable donations, she paid the costs of therapy herself, but it was delayed. She died eight months after the treatment. Her husband sued Health Net for bad faith, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional damage, and punitive damages and won. The jury awarded her estate $89 million. The HMO executives were branded killers. Ten states enacted laws requiring insurers to pay for bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer. Never mind that Health Net was right. Research ultimately showed the treatment to have no benefit for breast cancer patients and to actually worsen their lives. But the jury verdict shook the American insurance industry. Raising questions about doctors’ and patients’ treatment decisions in terminal illness was judged political suicide.
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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Penance (Scripture selection — Joel 2:12-13) The name of Gene Hamilton may be new to you if you are not from the archdiocese of New York or have not read A Priest Forever by Father Benedict Groeschel (published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1998). Gene was a seminarian for that archdiocese at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. From all accounts he was a fine student, a friendly, sincere young man, eager to be a priest. He was diagnosed with cancer, and the final years of his life were a real cross for him — pain, decline, hopes way up after surgery and treatment only to have them dashed with another outbreak. In his brave struggle a saint emerged, and I use that word purposefully. In his pain, agony, and dwindling strength, a man of deep faith, indomitable hope, and genuine love arose; a seminarian of prayer, who never complained, thought more of the needs and difficulties of others than his own. A man driven by one desire: to be united with Jesus in his passion and death, hopefully, yearning to do so as a priest. There was a lot of longing for a miracle by his family, brother seminarians, friends and admirers; many, including doctors and other medical personnel, told the young man, “You’re going to beat this, Gene.” Dozens who just knew he was too good, too innocent, too pure and holy to die so young and painfully, prayed for his recovery. In January of 1997, Gene Hamilton was too ill to come on the pilgrimage here to Rome with the men from Dunwoodie. Bishop Edwin O’Brien, realistic and thoughtful man that he is, with the late Cardinal John O’Connor, approached the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the dicastery of the Holy See under which seminaries come, for permission to ordain
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Timothy M. Dolan (Priests for the Third Millennium)
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physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
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Jessica Lourey (Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction)
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Gluten is associated with cancers of the mouth and throat, esophagus, small intestines, and lymph nodes. It is also associated with type 1 diabetes as well as thyroid disorders, such as Hashimoto’s, the most commonly diagnosed thyroid dysfunction in America. Many patients achieve normalization of their thyroid function only after adopting a gluten-free diet. Gluten sensitivity is also associated with other autoimmune diseases, such as Sjörgens syndrome and dermatitis herpetiformis. Hair loss, or autoimmune alopecia, is another presentation. It is also associated with depression, migraines, arthritis, fatigue, osteoporosis, and anemia, to name a few.
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Alejandro Junger (Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health)
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After ten months of no diagnoses or incorrect diagnoses—with her tummy distended as if she were hiding a small balloon under her dress—she finally heard it: “You have stage four ovarian cancer.” Gilda grabbed my face in her hands and sobbed, “No more bad news, no more bad news. I don’t want any more bad news.
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Gene Wilder (Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art)
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Affecting just a few dozen people worldwide, WHIM is a painful, potentially deadly immunodeficiency disease that makes life difficult for those unfortunate enough to suffer from it. It is caused by a tiny mutation—a single incorrect letter among some six billion total letters of one’s DNA, amounting to a change of just a dozen or so atoms. This minute transformation leaves WHIM victims profoundly susceptible to infection by human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes uncontrollable warts that cover the patient’s skin and can eventually progress to cancer. It’s a testament to the rareness of the disease that the patient in whom WHIM syndrome had first been diagnosed back in the 1960s was the same person whom the NIH researchers met all those years later. In the scientific literature, she’s known simply as WHIM-09, but I’ll call her Kim. Kim had been afflicted with WHIM since birth, and over the course of her life, she had been hospitalized multiple times with serious infections stemming from the disease. In 2013, Kim—then fifty-eight—presented herself and her two daughters, both in their early twenties, to the staff at NIH. The younger women had classic signs of the disease, but the scientists were surprised to discover that Kim herself seemed fine. In fact, she claimed to have been symptom-free for over twenty years. Shockingly, and without any medical intervention, Kim had been cured.
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Jennifer A. Doudna (A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering)
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When I say given, I don’t necessarily mean God gave it to you either. When Ansley was diagnosed with cancer, God didn’t give her that. He knew what would happen. He knew she’d get sick and what we would go through. So He allows hardship, yes, but doesn’t always cause it.
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Carolanne Miljavac (Odd(ly) Enough: Standing Out When the World Begs You To Fit In)
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As Annie Dillard wrote: "We have less time than we knew."
I wanted my mother to understand that I didn't plan picnics and parties because life was perfect and easy—I planned them because it wasn't. I planned them because my friend had died, because another friend's father had been diagnosed with cancer, because none of us knew what the future held. I planned them because, on the long, difficult slog up the mountain, it's important to stop and look at the view. I planned them because what is all the work for if you cannot gather the people you love around you in a golden sunset and laugh together? I planned them because winter was coming and we needed warm memories to sustain us.
We have less time than we knew. I understood that now.
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Tara Austen Weaver (Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow)
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My breast cancer diagnosis was in March, and now it was November. Reflecting back, why did I not get tested when I was first diagnosed? As an expert-patient, why did I not even think about getting tested for a BRCA mutation? The very short answer is that I did not really meet the criteria for testing and the test would have cost several thousand dollars were my insurance to decline to pay for it. The long answer is more complicated. No one recommended it.
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Pamela N. Munster (Twisting Fate: My Journey with BRCA - from Breast Cancer Doctor to Patient and Back: My Journey with BRCA―from Breast Cancer Doctor to Patient and Back)
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One or two cancer cells never hurt anyone. But how about a billion cancer cells? That’s how many may be in a tumor5 by the time it’s picked up by a mammogram.6 Like most tumors, breast cancer starts with just one cell, which divides to become two, four, and then eight. Every time breast cancer cells divide, the tumor can effectively double in size.7 Let’s see how many times a tiny tumor has to double to get to a billion cells. Take out a calculator. Multiply one times two. Then multiply that number by two. Keep doing that until you reach one billion. Don’t worry. It won’t take long. It’s only thirty doublings. In just thirty doublings, a single cancer cell can turn into a billion. The key to how quickly you’d be diagnosed with cancer, then, is the doubling time. How long does
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Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
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The incidence of CML remains unchanged from the past: only a few thousand patients are diagnosed with this form of leukemia every year. "But the prevalence of CML---the number of patients presently alive with the disease---has dramatically changed with the introduction of Gleevec. As of 2009, CML patients treated with Gleevec survive an average of thirty years after their initial diagnosis. Based on that survival figure, Hagop Kantarjian estimates that within the next decade, 250,000 people will be living with CML in America, all of them on targeted therapy. Druker's drug will alter the national physiognomy of cancer, converting a once-rare disease into a relatively common one. (Druker jokes that he has achieved the perfect inverstion of the golas of cancer medicine: his drug has increased the prevalence of cancer in the world.)
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
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And yet, there can be no bigger teacher, than life itself. Between 1998 and 2003, when the Scorpio was being developed, Pawan’s wife Mamta was diagnosed with breast cancer. At such a time, it would be natural to demand more time, more attention, from her husband. But Mamta was made of tougher stuff. She knew how crucial the Scorpio project was… A chance for Pawan to show the stuff he was made of. “Focus on your work, I can take care of myself,” she said to her husband. Through painful surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, Mamta remained positive. Neither Pawan nor the kids saw her moaning and groaning, in pain or distress. I don’t believe in or use too many buzzwords, and when I make any speech, what I hear as a compliment is that your speech was beautifully simple. “It is not that I was in denial but sharing my pain would make my family miserable… what would be the point? It was my battle, that I had to fight.
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Rashmi Bansal (Shine Bright)
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The existence of depression and other mental health conditions should not be nullified because of mental illness denialists, naysayers, and trolls. I may not walk around battered, bruised, and broken with my arm in a cast, with my neck in a brace, or my leg all wrapped up; but that does not indicate the absence of hurt or suffering. It may be invisible, incomprehensible, or even imaginary to some, but depression is just as real as cancer, diabetes, and any other illness. I have been diagnosed with it, so have millions of other people around the globe, and I’m not ashamed of it. What I’m ashamed of is ignorant people; people who obnoxiously belittle or invalidate other people’s experiences.
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K.J. Redelinghuys (Unfiltered: Grappling with Mental Illness)
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An extraordinarily grim academic article from 2009 looked at the marital outcome of 515 patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, observing groups battling malignant primary brain tumors, other forms of cancer, and multiple sclerosis. The study, which monitored male and female patients who were in heterosexual marriages over the course of five years, found there was a significant difference in the rate of "abandonment" depending on the gender of the patient. When the patient was male, and the supporting spouse female, divorce happened in 2.9 percent of cases. When the patient was female and the supporting spouse was male, divorce happened in 20.8 percent of cases-it was seven times more likely to happen.
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Rose Hackman (Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power)
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She’d been diagnosed with cancer, and I told her not to worry for I’d be following her soon after she leaves. Don’t you dare, were her exact words. And I didn’t - even though there was a huge part of me which wished I could just end things. That part now, loudly screaming at me once again; only to be drowned out by my wife saying, Don’t you dare again. Still. The temptation.
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Matt Shaw (My Wife, The Worm: Not Your Average Romance)
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the exercise of that autonomy means being able to relinquish it. Thus, it turns out that patients commonly prefer to have others make their medical decisions. One study found that although 64 percent of the general public thought they’d want to select their own treatment if they developed cancer, only 12 percent of newly diagnosed cancer patients actually did want to do so.
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Atul Gawande (Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science)
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Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of any cancer; half of those diagnosed with it die within six months, and 96 percent die within five years.
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Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
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In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said),
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John Freeman (The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story)
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Confusion and Dilemma
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“The criminals neither let investigation nor investigate crimes; indeed, it is it that authenticates itself an authentic proof of their involvement and conspiracy.”
― Ehsan Sehgal
I live in a highly civilized country where human rights, equality, justice, and freedom of expression are core principles and laws. However, in my case, they have never been realized or practically evident. Even the European Union and the United Nations have ignored my requests for an investigation against the Dutch state, which has criminally neglected me and consistently remained silent for many decades.
Human rights organizations, Dutch journalists, and media outlets have failed to demonstrate their fairness, neutrality, and freedom of the press. I have continuously remained a victim. Criminals have significantly succeeded in their unlawful motives.
I am still waiting, suffering from paralysis in both legs, a medical victim of circumstance, hoping for a miracle from someone who will recognize and understand the need to help before I can no longer share my story.
Note: This article was written on August 22, 2020, about Social Media; no, I am republishing it on Medium. I know there will be no response; one cannot expect justice from criminals.
Confusion and Dilemma
When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that I have no prostate cancer, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in my mind, whereas European doctors have diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer.
What should I believe and what not? However, my enemies are still awaiting my death. I breathe, expecting and waiting for the miracle of Allah; it will soon happen, I believe.
I neither feel trust in Dutch urologists and oncologists nor do I have the satisfaction of their treatment. I always realize that they do not tell the truth about how serious my disease is, but they never discuss it.
Today, the urologist called me, asking how I was feeling. I told him that I was suffering from mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulty; he didn’t pay notice and said that the endoscopy showed nothing dangerous.
I asked him, I have planned to visit my family in Pakistan and will stay longer than I used to stay; therefore, I need medicine for that period. He replied in an unsympathetic way that medicine is costly if you pass away there; it costs insurance money.
I requested an MRI scan to make sure that the cancer is not spreading to other parts of the body; he declined, saying PSA stays down, so there is no need for this. It saddened me that they think about the insurance provider but not the patient. On the other side, my insurance provider, VGZ, has refused to pay the costs of a new treatment in Germany, which I would try again.
Indeed, such a situation has put me on the track of a dilemma; however, God has given me the enormous power and courage to bear two severe and mysterious incidents since 1980. My experience proves that none of the medicines heal, whether those are homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even spiritual healing.
It seems the rivals continuously attack to harm and damage me: Who are they? The answer is simple: they are in first place, Qadiyyanis, and second place are evil-minded individuals, criminals, and intelligence agency murderers.
My fate stands as a barrier in front of me that no one sees or realizes how I have faced, and I am still facing that. God is great, and one day, such criminals will be in court for their criminal deeds to taste transparent justice.
Factually, I remain sure that Dutch institutions have provided me with workers through private bureaus; those are trusted or risky ones since intelligence agencies can hire them as well. It is a valid question that requires an authentic answer.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air- conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temperature to the same set point. temperature, but the air-conditioning system always returns the temperature to the same set point.
Some air-conditioning systems are set at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Indeed, even if our gloomy friend wins $50,000,000 in the morning, discovers the cure for both AIDS and cancer by noon, makes peace between Israelis and Palestinians that afternoon, and then in the evening reunites with her long-lost child who disappeared years ago - she would still be incap- able of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may.
Think for a moment of your family and friends. You know some people who remain relatively joyful, no matter what befalls them. And then there are those who are always disgruntled, no matter what gifts the world lays at their feet. We tend to believe that if we could just change our workplace, get married, finish writing that novel, buy a new car or repay the mortgage, we would be on top of the world. Yet when we get what we desire we don't seem to be any happier.
Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Three cancer diagnoses in ten years and I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it, so I just decided not to.
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B.K. Borison (First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1))
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I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed
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Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
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began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live. —
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Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)