Cancer Patients Quotes

In 1975, the respected British medical journal Lancet reported on a study which compared the effect on cancer patients of (1) a single chemotherapy, (2) multiple chemotherapy, and (3) no treatment at all. No treatment 'proved a significantly better policy for patients' survival and for quality of remaining life.' ~ Barry Lynes

Wrecking civilization one story at a time."

"That hardest day in any cancer patient's life is the day after he's cured."

"Some of us aren't made strong. We're extras, made out of the leftovers the gods had after making the good men. "
--Inclinations of the Solar Winds

"Just Foxing along--another day, another song. ~ T. Fox Dunham

Let's not call cancer patients as patients, they are cancer fighters. They are brave hearts. ~ Vikrmn

If we had always thought from a so-called practical angle – we would've never had anything new in this world. We would've hidden under the security of practicality and taken no risk, we would have never discovered heart transplantation as a new possibility, we would've never thought curing cancer patients a possibility, and we would've never discovered a new galaxy in the universe. Taking the cover of practicality is more or less like hiding under the cover of security for fear of failure. ~ Ravindra Shukla

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

To refrain and desist from interfering with terminal cancer patients, in their use of Laetrile acquired through the 'Affidavit System. ~ Luther L. Bohanon

While some methods of calculation find that cancer and its patients take up too many resources, from another angle, cancer patients are cash cows. Each cancer patient generates millions of dollars in revenues. If one wonders why we would extend the life of a pancreatic patient for a dozen days with a $16,000 drug, let's remember that this money does not evaporate after twelve days; it continues to circulate in stock prices, salaries, and smaller crumbs of an infinitely profitable cancer pie. Just as the demon of communism justified the proliferation of a lucrative nuclear industry, so cancer fills the core of so many economies that if a cure were to be found, the economy might just crash. ~ S. Lochlann Jain

Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they're at an 8 instead of 9 or 10. ~ Ed Diener

Terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. ~ Atul Gawande

I look upon cancer in the same way that I look upon heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, or even obesity, for that matter, in that by dramatically strengthening the body's immune system through diet, nutritional supplements, and exercise, the body can rid itself of the cancer, just as it does in other degenerative diseases. Consequently, I wouldn't have chemotherapy and radiation because I'm not interested in therapies that cripple the immune system, and, in my opinion, virtually ensure failure for the majority of cancer patients. ~ Julian Whitaker

I could not move them. They would not even agree to a modification, of the ruling (banning the Rand vaccine), which would at least allow the 100 (cancer) patients at Richmond Heights (Ohio) to complete their injections. The Justice Department was prepared to go along, but the FDA commissioner, Dr. James Goddard, was adamant, even belligerent. It's wrong of the government to snatch away this hope when there is no evidence against its use offered in court. It's damnably wrong. ~ Stephen Young

It's about focusing on the fight and not the fright. ~ Robin Roberts

Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. ~ Julian Barnes

But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself. ~ Mark A. Noll

While I principally agree with the NOW movement I also challenge their thinking to a degree. There are plenty of exceptions to the being-present-rule. I have for example worked with cancer patients who were going through very trying times in their therapy, and they couldn't stand to think about the present moment, they needed to envision a better future or remember an enjoyable time from their past to feel slightly better. The present moment was simply a torment. This can be true in a number of other situations where the present moment is simply too awful and painful to intently focus on. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Hope is as essential to your life as air and water. You need hope to cope. Dr. Bernie Siegel found he could predict which of his cancer patients would go into remission by asking, "Do you want to live to be one hundred?" Those with a deep sense of life purpose answered yes and were the ones most likely to survive. Hope comes from having a purpose. ~ Rick Warren

A one year study by the Washington Post has documented 620 cases in which experimental drugs have been implicated in the deaths of cancer patients ... And they amount to merely a fraction of the thousands of people who in recent years have died or suffered terribly from cancer experiments ... ~ Ted Gup

group of rookies can outperform individual experts. Behavioral scientists at the University of Chicago showed that expert pathologists poorly predict a cancer patient's survival time based on viewing a biopsy slide; yet when the decision of a group of less experienced individuals is aggregated, the readings are much more accurate than the predictions of individual experts. ~ Liz Wiseman

I'll never forget the crippling headaches Grandpa suffered, the nausea from chemo and radiation. I watched Daddy wrestle with decision after decision, ultimately withholding IV antibiotics to treat the pneumonia that took Grandpa more quickly and far more gently. Barrons is voicing the legitimate question of anyone who's ever agreed not to resuscitate, to cease life-sustaining measures for a loved one, to accept a Stage 4 cancer patient's decision to refuse more chemo, or euthanize a beloved pet. Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one's presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they're gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don't know how to walk or breathe when they're no longer there. And how could you? Your world revolved around them. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Reducing the price of AIDS drugs gave me so much satisfaction that I've been thinking what else I could do. One day, I thought, 'Let's look at cancer and see how we can spare cancer patients' unnecessary suffering.' ~ Yusuf Hamied

Caregiving leaves its mark on us. No matter what we do to prepare ourselves the hole left behind looms large. ~ Dale L. Baker

Life is a terminal condition. Were all going to die. Cancer patients just have more information, but we all, in some ways, wait for permission to live. ~ Kris Carr

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain's stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.

Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feel ~ Gabor Mate

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. ~ Atul Gawande

It's unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

We're really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

Treating only terminal cancer patients, the Rand (anti-cancer) vaccine produced objective improvement in 35% of 600 patients while another 30% demonstrated subjective improvement. FDA stopped the vaccine's use in a federal court hearing where neither the cancer patients nor their doctors were allowed to testify. ~ Barry Lynes

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them ~ Atul Gawande

We see cancer patients battling death as valiant, and we think that if they try hard enough, they'll beat it. In truth, cancer is an equal-opportunity killer and is impervious to moral virtues and emotional strength. No amount of courage increases a patient's likelihood of survival. For every courageous patient who survives, there is another courageous patient who does not. Of course you'd never know that from popular media, where patients wage battle against cancer and win, and where almost everyone survives CPR and looks remarkably good hooked up to a breathing machine. ~ Bloomsbury Publishing

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome. ~ Tom Brokaw

You can be a victim of cancer, or a survivor of cancer. It's a mindset. ~ Dave Pelzer

Cancer affects all of us, whether you're a daughter, mother, sister, friend, coworker, doctor, patient. ~ Jennifer Aniston

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem. ~ David D. Burns

Having cancer, fighting cancer, and beating cancer have been THE defining events in my life, and though it was the most terrifying, I know that it has changed me for the better, forever. ~ Brett M. Cordes

The risk of developing carcinoma of the lung increases steadily as the amount smoked increases. If the risk among non-smokers is taken as unity and the resulting ratios in the three age groups in which a large number of patients were interviewed (ages 45 to 74) are averaged, the relative risks become 6, 19, 26, 49, and 65 when the number of cigarettes smoked a day are 3, 10, 20, 35, and, say, 60-that is, the mid-points of each smoking group. In other words, on the admittedly speculative assumptions we have made, the risk seems to vary in approximately simple proportion with the amount smoked. ~ Richard Doll

What we are fighting isn't godlessness
this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines ... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right. ~ Abraham Verghese

This charity ... They quibble too much over procedures ... while we seek a cure. They complain too loudly against another who, seemingly, has perfected a work that the public expects its charity dollars to do. Maybe we should investigate the American Cancer Society's operations. ~ Roland V. Libonati

Through the lessons we have learned over the years, especially in obstetric anesthesia where we have seen (and our unfortunate patients have experienced) the unpleasant consequences of unblocked segments or hemi-block with epidurals, and many other clinical situations, we now realize that blocking 60% of the nerves that innervate a joint does not reduce pain by 60%. In fact, it focuses 100% of the pain into the remaining 40% of the joint, therefore, in actual fact, worsening the pain and suffering of the patient. ~ Andre P. Boezaart

I was very surprised when last I bought a packet of cigarettes and had to request a refund as I read a warning that told me "smoking can cause fatal lung cancer". ~ Robert Clark

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed. ~ Bruce Feiler

...to remind myself that a person can die while they're still alive, simply by not choosing to live." It's taken me a long time to understand what she'd meant by that. Worry can be pernicious. Left unchecked, it slowly bleeds the soul of joy and replaces it with fear. ~ Ami McKay

metabolic impairment can also cause decreased appetite or an absence of appetite. Patients with this kind of metabolic issue tend to struggle with making food choices, either having trouble deciding between foods or feeling that nothing looks good. ~ Emily Cooper

Please don't preach at me - I feel bad enough already. ~ Shirley Corder

Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing. ~ Jean Leclercq

Black people loving and losing is something we don't see enough of. We're always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It's time we reinvigorated that type of film. ~ Ava DuVernay

Did you know that some of the counties in the coalfields have the highest rates of cancer in the country? ~ John Grisham

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like. ~ Jonas Salk

The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that, at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in women. A vaccine is now available - these days, vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed - not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it. We ~ Christopher Hitchens

When the doctor told me I had cancer, I was scared. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Ah. Alicia, see? Didn't I tell you that's what she needed to begin with? Maybe a little schtupping and it would make the cancer go away. It works with pimples.'
'Nana! ~ Wendy Wunder

Hats, giant shades and 60-plus sunblock are part of my summer repertoire. I don't want wrinkles, but it's skin cancer I truly fear. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you. ~ Anthony Liccione

Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

I'm battling cancer. It's another battle I intend to win. ~ Arlen Specter

I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. ~ Tracy Chapman

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In such cases, each hemisphere might well have its own beliefs. Consider what this says about the dogma - widely held under Christianity and Islam - that a person's salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If a split-brain patient's left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the right doesn't, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity in hellfire? ~ Sam Harris

The English, who look on stoically as national health hospitals in run-down metropolitan areas close their wards through lack of support and patients spend time on trolleys in corridors, are comforted by the knowledge that wounded hedgehogs are tenderly cared for in a hedgehog hospital. ~ Antony Miall

I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes.' (135) ~ Sheldon B. Kopp

My mom, she's a breast cancer survivor and because of that I had started getting mammograms once a year, starting at age 30. ~ Kate Walsh

By more than two to one Americans do not consider what Kevorkian did, injecting a terminally ill patient with legal drugs at the patient's request, to be the same as murder. You may want to note that laws are not supposed to be enforced on the basis of public opinion polls. ~ Dan Rather

I have been tested in many ways, personally, I have beaten breast cancer, I buried a child to addiction. Professionally, you cannot go from being a secretary of nine-person real estate firm to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world without having been tested over and over and over. ~ Carly Fiorina

In 'Love Story,' Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can't resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she's diagnosed with cancer and they can't afford the costly treatments. ~ Susan Straight

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And ~ Tom Robbins