Whats it like having cancer or watching someone you care about deal with cancer?

?Hmmm? Hardest thing is helping the person you care about understand that there is a reason for suffering and that good ultimately comes out of every situation. That is how it looks in hindsight, anyway.

What kind of cancer was it and how long did you have it?

I was diagnosed with hodgkins disease...

I remember feeling like I was staying alive because my goddamnd family wouldn't let me die.

Hi Gracie, I had endometrial cancer (a kind of cancer of the uterus). I don't know how long I had it. As soon as I found out I had it, action was taken to get rid of it.

The same applies to the cancer of the larynx I had. Find it; get rid of it.

For me, having cancer was like living in the middle of a gray cloud. Not quite focused, not quite clear. Part of that was depression.

I was treated with surgery and radiation for the first cancer and radiation for the second cancer. That's when I got tattooed!

They have to aim the radiation beam. Once they get it exactly where it's supposed to be, they put a little dot of a tattoo on my body so that they can get the aim right every time. Ouch.

I was diagnosed with hodgkins disease in '93ish, as a sophomore or junior in H.S. Hodgkins is one of the more treatable types of cancer but I was in a very late stage so the various chemo treatments administered were unsuccessful.

I remember feeling like I was staying alive because my goddamnd family wouldn't let me die. Overdramatic, for sure. But i was a messed up teenager, losing battles with depression left and right to begin with. I also vividly recall once feeling death "coming". I have never before or since felt like that. I was simply too sick and in too much pain to be scared of it...

So the last ditch effort called for a lengthy stay at the cleaveland clinic (2 weeks outpatient, one month inpatient) right after graduation, for a then experimental treatment: stem cell transplant, similar to the bone marrow transplant (I think). Not fun times. After that I had a few weeks of radiation and was back to a life of years of reckless abandonment.

Someone I know who has cancer described it as "being all alone, locked in a room with the most dangerous evil thing you can imagine". And I can tell you that from the outside of that room, the overwhelming feeling is helplessness.

?Hmmm? Hardest thing is helping the person you care about understand that there is a reason for suffering and that good ultimately comes out of every situation. That is how it looks in hindsight, anyway.

Until I came to grips with the disease (lymphoma) I had this sickening feeling that my body was conspiring to destroy itself.

My sister has cancer and it has been going on 3 years. The hardest part is knowing she is scared and calls me crying because she wants answers and I can't give then to her and neither can the doctors.

When my brother told me he had terminal cancer and that he had no options before him but chemotherapy, I knew I would lose him. The doc told him he had one year. In other words, he knew my brother could not survive the treatment. But he insisted it had to be done, because no other treatment was to be offered by established medicine. Sam was tortured and emaciated and true to the doc's word, he died. Sam did not understand that when the chemo knocks out the primary tumor(s) the cancer is triggered to spread quicker and to form new tumors at an increasing rate. There are situations in which chemotherapy can save a life. But, not in a case like Sam's. After decades of failure, you would think the medical establishment would admit it. Sam told me, "I never thought it would be like this." He told me later the same day, "If I knew then what I know now, I would not have had chemotherapy."

I think that about says it all.

Until I came to grips with the disease (lymphoma) I had this sickening feeling that my body was conspiring to destroy itself.