Lymph Nodes Quotes

Back when I’d been sick, I’d always dreaded hearing other words. Spread. Lymph nodes. Amputation. Those words, those possibilities, make you grow up quick. They made me remember to prioritize correctly, to value and appreciate. But mainly the branches of those words scared me so much, I wanted to live even if it wasn’t always going to be fun and games.

In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don't obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup. Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can't I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don't check the shipments in the blood. You are full to overflowing but the keeper is asleep and there's murder going on inside. Who comes here? Let me hold up my lantern. It's only the blood; red cells carrying oxygen to the heart, thrombocytes making sure of proper clotting. The white cells, B and T types, just a few of them as always whistling as they go. The faithful body has made a mistake. This is no time to stamp the passports and look at the sky. Coming up behind are hundreds of them. Hundreds too many, armed to the teeth for a job that doesn't need doing. Not needed? With all that weaponry? Here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight. There's no-one to fight but you Louise. You're the foreign body now.

the problem that I’ve found with most poets that I have known is that they’ve never had an 8 hour job and there is nothing that will put a person more in touch with the realities than an 8 hour job. they have been protected against the actualities from the beginning and they understand nothing but the ends of their fingernails and their delicate hairlines and their lymph nodes. their words are unlived, unfurnished, un- true, and worse—so fashionably dull. poet (?): that word needs re-defining.

The bubonic form is characterised by telltale ‘buboes’, when lymph nodes swell painfully; the septicaemic form arises from an infection of the

If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

We have retinas that face backward, the stump of a tail, and way too many bones in our wrists. We must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves. We are poorly equipped to survive in the climates in which we now live. We have nerves that take bizarre paths, muscles that attach to nothing, and lymph nodes that do more harm than good. Our genomes are filled with genes that don’t work, chromosomes that break, and viral carcasses from past infections. We have brains that play tricks on us, cognitive biases and prejudices, and a tendency to kill one another in large numbers. Millions of us can’t even reproduce successfully without a whole lot of help from modern science. Our flaws illuminate not only our evolutionary past but also our present and future. Everyone knows that it is impossible to understand current events in a specific country without understanding the history of that country and how the modern state came to be. The same is true for our bodies, our genes, and our minds.

How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn’t a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he

Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

She had launched right into inflammation, the body’s first response to any threat, the common denominator of all disease. In minutes she had drawn them into the thick of a battle: the invaders (typhoid bacteria) are spotted by the hilltop sentries (macrophages), who send signals back to the castle (the bone marrow and lymph nodes). The few aging veterans of previous battles with typhoid (memory T-lymphocytes) are roused from their beds, summoned to hastily teach untested conscripts the specific typhoid-grappling skills needed, and then to arm them with custom lances designed solely to latch onto and pierce the typhoid shield—in essence, the veterans clone their younger selves.

Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.

But Project 56 revealed that a nuclear detonation wasn’t the only danger that a weapon accident might pose. The core of the Genie contained plutonium—and when it blew apart, plutonium dust spread through the air. The risks of plutonium exposure were becoming more apparent in the mid-1950s. Although the alpha particles emitted by plutonium are too weak to penetrate human skin, they can destroy lung tissue when plutonium dust is inhaled. Anyone within a few hundred feet of a weapon accident spreading plutonium can inhale a swiftly lethal dose. Cancers of the lung, liver, lymph nodes, and bone can be caused by the inhalation of minute amounts. And the fallout from such an accident may contaminate a large area for a long time. Plutonium has a half-life of about twenty-four thousand years. It remains hazardous throughout that period, and plutonium dust is hard to clean up. “The problem of decontaminating the site of [an] accident may be insurmountable,” a classified Los Alamos report noted a month after the Genie’s one-point safety test, “and it may have to be ‘written off’ permanently.

When Dr. Ramasamy first lectured to their class in the century-old Donovan Auditorium, even the murmuring backbenchers were silenced when the tall, confident woman in a short-sleeved lab coat floated in. She had launched right into inflammation, the body’s first response to any threat, the common denominator of all disease. In minutes she had drawn them into the thick of a battle: the invaders (typhoid bacteria) are spotted by the hilltop sentries (macrophages), who send signals back to the castle (the bone marrow and lymph nodes). The few aging veterans of previous battles with typhoid (memory T-lymphocytes) are roused from their beds, summoned to hastily teach untested conscripts the specific typhoid-grappling skills needed, and then to arm them with custom lances designed solely to latch onto and pierce the typhoid shield—in essence, the veterans clone their younger selves. The same veterans of prior typhoid campaigns also assemble a biological-warfare platoon (B lymphocytes) who hastily manufacture a one-of-a-kind boiling oil (antibodies) to pour over the castle wall; it will melt the typhoid intruders’ shields, while not harming others. Meanwhile, having heard the call to battle, the rogue mercenaries (neutrophils), armed to the teeth,

The primary cause of death was listed as cryptococcal pneumonia, which was a consequence of his Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Those, however, were only the obvious diseases. The KS lesions, it turned out, covered not only his skin but also his lungs, bronchi, spleen, bladder, lymph nodes, mouth, and adrenal glands. His eyes were infected not only with cytomegalovirus but also with Cryptococcus and the Pneumocystis protozoa. It was the first time the pathologist could recall seeing the protozoa infect a person’s eye. Ken’s mother claimed his body from the hospital the day after he died. By the afternoon, Ken’s remains were cremated and tucked into a small urn. His Kaposi’s sarcoma had led to the discovery in San Francisco of the epidemic that would later be called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He had been the first KS case in the country reported to a disbelieving Centers for Disease Control just eight months before. Now, he was one of eighteen such stricken people in San Francisco and the fourth man in the city to die in the epidemic, the seventy-fourth to die in the United States. There would be many, many more.

Life Expectancy Neither one-second less nor more than that which God has written and fixed the time for death. I am suffering from stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes and bones since the medical mistake and even medical crime, as I had explained in that article.[1], [2]. Treatment of hormone therapy and radiotherapy as an expected outcome became ineffective for such level cancer; whereas, another option was the chemotherapy that I refuse since that has terrible and painful side effects than as cancer itself. Now alternative treatment is a Xitnadi tablet along with hormone therapy as Zoladex injection. My survival and life expectancy lies in prayers and God. In Germany and other western countries, modern and incredibly effective treatments stay in practice for longer life expectancy without terrible side effects. In the Netherlands, such technology, the health providers deliberately fail to provide; however, only rich and capable people can afford that. Therefore, I wait for the miracle; it is my source if it happens.

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

Syphilis is caused by a spiral bacterium (aka a spirochete) known as Treponema pallidum. The bacterium is usually acquired during sexual contact, whereupon it corkscrews its way across mucous membranes, multiplies in the blood and lymph nodes, and, if a patient is especially unlucky, gets into the central nervous system, including the brain, causing personality change, psychosis, depression, dementia, and death. That’s in the absence of antibiotic treatment, anyway; modern antibiotics cure syphilis easily. But there were no modern antibiotics in 1917, and the early chemical treatment known as Salvarsan (containing arsenic) didn’t work well against late-stage syphilis in the nervous system. Wagner-Juaregg solved that problem after noting that Treponema pallidum didn’t survive in a test tube at temperatures much above 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Raise the blood temperature of the infected person a few degrees, he realized, and you might cook the bacterium to death. So he began inoculating patients with Plasmodium vivax. He would allow them to cycle through three or four spikes of fever, delivering potent if not terminal setbacks to the Treponema, and then dose them with quinine, bringing the plasmodium under control. “The effect was remarkable; the downward progression of late-stage syphilis was stopped,” by one account, from the late Robert S. Desowitz, who was a prominent parasitologist himself as well as a lively writer. “Institutions for malaria therapy rapidly proliferated throughout Europe and the technique was taken up in several centers in the United States. In this way, tens of thousands of syphilitics were saved from a sure and agonizing death”—saved by malaria.

In Italy one doctor gave intravenous injections of mercuric chloride. Another rubbed creosote, a disinfectant, into the axilla, where lymph nodes, outposts of white blood cells scattered through the body, lie beneath the skin.

In part, popular opposition resulted from the fact that the vaccine provided only partial immunity, and everyone soon knew of people who had been vaccinated but still contracted plague. Furthermore, the vaccine produced unpleasant side effects—vertigo, headache, enlargement of the lymph nodes, and painful swelling at the vaccination site—that incapacitated recipients for days. Such complications reinforced suspicion that the British were dispensing poison.

tell from bones whether someone has had a tattoo?’ ‘Well,’ says Ruth, ‘the ink used in tattoos can migrate to the lymph nodes so,

In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.

One consistent feature stood out: The samples all displayed a striking depletion of white blood cells within the lymph nodes and bone marrow, precisely the tissues that become packed with the feverishly dividing cells of lymphoma patients. Two Yale pharmacologists, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, who had contracted to study the therapeutic effects of nitrogen mustard, made the connection. In a burst of imagination they entertained the possibility that the war gas possessed a dual nature, that it was a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde compound that could exist both on the battlefield and within a physician’s clinic.

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, singlemalt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain deaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

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.

post-mastectomy and lymph node clearance, we all have to be careful of the risk of lymphoedema

the removal of lymph nodes, but also radiotherapy, chemo and other cancer treatments, as well as the cancer itself, can damage the lymph system so that it struggles to remove the excess lymph flui

Throat Let your fingers touch each other as you cup your hands on the bottom of the throat. Be gentle, and hold on to your hands, but do not touch your throat. Helping the thyroid and parathyroid gland, vocal cords, larynx, and lymph nodes, this hand position handles the throat (fifth) chakra that regulates neck and chest. This is the seat of communication and expression. Using therapy to help the patient speak, speak their minds, talk for themselves, and tell their reality. It's also perfect for writer’s block! Collarbone Place your hands with your fingers pointing to the middle of your chest on the sides of your arms. This position gives Reiki to the area of the thymus between the chakras of the throat and the neck. For immune function, the thymus gland is essential. Place yourself behind or on the recipient's side for this next position (it all depends on your height logistics, their height, and how far you can stretch!). Back of the neck and front of the heart Put your left hand under the neck area and your right hand over the top of the heart area of the middle. This role incorporates heart and back care of the heart. They address two regions simultaneously: the chakra of the throat and the chakra of the heart, which helps to express one's heart or to say one's reality. This is a good position to handle high blood pressure; any position on the neck actually helps reduce high blood pressure. Heart Place the hands in a T, a hand positioned horizontally above the breasts, and a hand placed vertically between the breasts. Treating the heart (fourth) chakra governs everything related to the circulatory system, including the pulse, veins, and arteries; the lungs (related to the chakras of the heart and throat); the breasts; and the thymus. Opening Reiki's heart chakra increases the supply of affection, air, and nourishment that can be received and offered. The recipient feels acceptance and a sense of love and compassion when the heart chakra is free and moving.

Hodgkin may have been disappointed by what he thought was only a descriptive study of his disease. But he had underestimated the value of careful observation—by compulsively studying anatomy alone, he had stumbled upon the most critical revelation about this form of lymphoma: Hodgkin’s disease had a peculiar propensity of infiltrating lymph nodes locally one by one. Other cancers could be more unpredictable—more “capricious,” as one oncologist put it. Lung cancer, for instance, might start as a spicular nodule in the lung, then unmoor itself and ambulate unexpectedly into the brain. Pancreatic cancer was notoriously known to send sprays of malignant cells into faraway sites such as the bones and the liver. But Hodgkin’s—an anatomist’s discovery—was anatomically deferential: it moved, as if with a measured, ordered pace, from one contiguous node to another—from gland to gland and from region to region.

Those who survived mustard-gas attacks later developed severe anemia, requiring monthly blood transfusions. They were also prone to recurrent, lingering, and sometimes fatal infections. In 1919, one year after World War I ended, two American pathologists, Helen and Edward Krumbhaar, performed autopsies on seventy-five soldiers who had been killed by mustard gas. They found that the gas depleted the bone marrow, where red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are made. They also found that lymph nodes, another source of white blood cells, had shrunk. The Krumbhaars published their findings in 1919. No one noticed. Specifically, no one recognized that if mustard gas could eliminate white blood cells and shrink lymph nodes, maybe it could also eliminate cancers of the bone marrow (leukemias) and cancers of the lymph nodes (lymphomas).

The lymphatic system is a network of vessels, nodes, and organs that removes waste products and toxins from our bodies, and it is part of your immune system, which protects you against infection and disease. This system relies on passive circulation. In other words, unlike the blood vessels (which require a heart to pump the blood around the body), there is no pump for the lymph system. The lymph system relies on your muscles tightening and relaxing around the lymph vessels to move the lymph, a process called lymph drainage. To keep this system working well, it is important to be using your muscles regularly—another benefit of WBV!

a 2016 study linked another protein in wheat, amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs), to inflammation in the lymph nodes, kidneys, spleen, and brain, and suggested that it could be linked to arthritis, asthma, and fatty liver disease, among other things.

And blood? It is a conglomerate of organs, a system of systems. It has built training camps for its armies (lymph nodes), highways and alleys to move its cells (blood vessels). It has citadels and walls that are constantly being surveyed and repaired by its residents (neutrophils and platelets). It has invented a system of identification cards to recognize its citizens and eject intruders (T cells) and an army to guard itself from invaders (B cells). It has evolved language, organization, memory, architecture, subcultures, and self-recognition. A new metaphor comes to mind. Perhaps we might think of it as a cellular civilization.

the cancer was in my lymph nodes and my doctor was afraid it had already spread.

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

Long story short: The next three and a half years were a blur of treatment and recovery, with occasional flashes of hope illuminating dark tunnels of anxiety. She had surgery to remove her infected lymph nodes and the metastases in her liver and stomach. The surgery was followed by radiation, which was excruciating, turning her skin black in places and leaving behind nasty scars to go with the ones she’d collected in the operating room. She also learned there were different kinds of melanoma, even for those with stage IV, which led to different treatment options. In her case, that meant immunotherapy, which seemed to work for a couple of years, until it finally didn’t.

Most cancers are named for where they start in the body. Many cancers form solid tumors, which are growths of tissue. But there are warning signs Fever, chills Persistent fatigue, weakness Bone/joint pain Unexplained weight loss Swollen lymph nodes, liver and spleen Anemia

Among parents who lost an adult son to an accident or military conflict, the authors reported increased occurrence of lymphatic and hematological malignancy—cancers of the blood, bone marrow, and lymph nodes—along with skin and lung cancer.8 War kills, and so, it seems, can deep emotional loss. As for cancer, so with other illnesses. In a Danish nationwide study, grieving parents had double the risk of multiple sclerosis.9

And at 10:23 p.m. Central Time, a cornfield in Buttercup, Iowa split open and It emerged: that selfsame deity that the Pre-Atlantean, Post-Lemurian Serpent Priests addressed by Seven-Thousand-and-Twelve Sacred Names (Number Eleven translating to “Whatever It Is, We Wish It Would Just Leave Us Alone”); that lugubrious critter known to the ancient Aztecs as He-Who-Drips-Sweat-All-Over-Our-Nice-Clean-Temple, to whom they sacrificed the lymph nodes of their enemies after they’d given the hearts to gods they actually liked.

The remaining lymph nodes may become damaged if the IV were to get infected or by the meds/fluids running through it. This could result in permanent lymphedema in the affected extremity. Note that this is most common with mastectomies but also applies to any procedure where lymph nodes were removed. If no lymph nodes were removed then it is OK to use the arm even with a mastectomy.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disabling condition characterized by severe unexplained fatigue and a mixed profile of symptoms such as sore throat, painful/swollen lymph nodes, muscle pain, joint pain, headaches, unrefreshing sleep, post-exertional malaise and cognitive difficulties (K. Fukuda et al., 1994).

Here are the odds of five-year survival for several common cancers: Cancer Type Odds If Localized If Spread to Lymph Nodes Odds If Metastatic Chance of Getting It Chance of Dying From It Malignant Melanoma 90% 10% 2.5% 0.5% Squamous Cell Skin Cancer ~100% 10% 7.5% 0.01% Bladder Cancer 88% 55% 15% 2.5% 0.6% Breast Cancer ~100% 72% 22% 12% 3% Prostate Cancer ~100% ~100% 28% 15% 2.6% Colorectal Cancer 92% 65% 11% 4.6% 1.9% Esophageal Cancer 40% 21% 4% 0.9% 0.7% Lung Cancer 31% 15% 2% 6.8% 5.8% Pancreatic Cancer 14% 7% 1% 1.5% 1.35% Liver Cancer 28% 7% 2% Leukemia Varies Varies Varies 1.4% 0.8%

The cancer was pretty well-advanced, already storming her lymph nodes, and it resisted the radiation and the chemo like some kind of unstoppable beast in a low-grade horror film.

part of a crash of rhinos, or a stubbornness of rhinos. “Phew,” my mom says when she hears the good lymph node news. “I couldn’t bear checking out of this life without knowing you were going to be okay.” A gaze of raccoons. A rhumba of rattlesnakes. A float of crocodiles. A rafter of turkeys. A business of ferrets. An exaltation of skylarks.

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.

The common symptoms of genital herpes that usually arise are small groupings of blisters and wounds; Itching and discomfort; burning when urinating, in cases where the blisters are very close to the urethra and swollen lymph nodes in the crotch.

Nine hours of surgery to salvage his bladder so it might work half as well as it did, if infections do not consume him. His prostate cut from his thin boy body, seminal vesicles too, rendering him unable to know a certain intimacy but familiar with the incontinence of the old man he probably will never be, his injuries likely to shorten his life by at least two decades. If he survives the next breath. If he ever wakes. And this surgery came only after another that was more vital. Seventeen hours of delicate, intensive surgery on his lower spine, two cracked vertebrae fused together using bone from his hip, the shrapnel from a bullet lodged too close to his spinal cord to risk removal. His gallbladder gone, as well as a lymph node. Feet of small intestine excised, the lower lobe of his right lung damaged, leaving him with such diminished capacity that playing on the jungle gym will be tantamount to summiting Everest. My boy’s body parts incinerated somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. All this just his bodily damage. Who can know the damage to his soul and mind?