Yu Fong’s Journey with Cancer
In the second half of 1998, I did not feel well, but could not find anything wrong after all kinds of examinations. Two weeks before I found out that I had end stage ovarian cancer, I was in Malaysia giving a lecture. I wasn’t even aware that I had such a serious disease.
After I returned to Taipei, for the second time, I went through the colonoscopy and found out the ovarian lump was large. The tumor grew on the wall of the intestine–outside of the intestine–pressing the intestine, so the bowel could not get through. It was detected by ultrasound, and I decided to have surgery immediately. My surgery was done on December 31, 1998. It last for nine hours.
I think there are many different kinds of cancer; each individual has his or her own physical makeup. The reaction to treatments will not be the same with everybody, and there are many different kinds of drugs. So basically, I feel that my chemotherapy treatment was not too bad. To go through my chemo treatment safely, I tried hard to eat food with better nutrition and a more balance diet. Then to do your best to, for instance to take walks in the countryside; or to go to restaurants surrounded with friends and to have a meals at restaurants with a pleasant atmosphere, to ease the pain of my illness. So half a year went by very quickly. The closer to the end [of treatment], my reaction would become not too difficult. …read the rest of this entry»

Wendy: Introduction
Hi. May name is Wendy. I’m a 45-year-old physician, and a long-term lymphoma survivor from Dallas, Texas. Before I do my story, I would like to thank you for your work. I really do feel that this site helps tame patients’ fears and nourish their hopes. So thank you for that.
A physician’s story
In 1990, after years of caring for patients in my solo practice of internal medicine, I started to develop a rash each time I took a hot shower and I noticed some enlargement of some lymph nodes in my groin, that had been small and innocent looking for years. As these lymph nodes grew, they began to press on the nerves to my leg and back, and over the course of a week or two, they caused excruciating pain. Surgery showed that I had a low-grade lymphoma that was considered incurable. Now research at the time suggested that maybe the tumor would be curable if treated with aggressive chemotherapy, so I received six months of an intensive regimen. Back in 1990, they didn’t have today’s effective anti nausea medicines, or the growth factors that prevent the blood counts from staying low, so I had to close my medical practice for the ten months I was sick. I did get into remission and I reopened my medical practice and resumed work. Unfortunately, before my one-year checkup, a cancerous lymph node popped up in my neck, and that’s when I closed my medical practice permanently.
Complicated treatment
I was then treated with radiation, which got me back into remission, and my doctors then prescribed Interferon, which were shots of an immune-system stimulator. Because research at the time suggested it might prolong my remission. I have to tell you I did not tolerate Interferon very well, I had debilitating nausea and fatigue, and after four months of this, my scan showed lymphoma. …read the rest of this entry»

Hi. My name is Terry Healy and I’m a 37-year-old male. I was diagnosed in 1984 with a rare form of cancer called a fibrosarcoma. I was a junior at Cal Berkeley at the time and was president of my fraternity, and I had pretty much lived life on Easy Street. I had been a high school prince and was my fraternity president, and life was going pretty smoothly. When I was diagnosed with the fibrosarcoma it took five weeks for them to give me the diagnosis, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that a fibrosarcoma is a very rare form of cancer, and a rare form of a sarcoma cancer. Just to provide some background, sarcomas represent about a half of one percent of all cancers to the best of my knowledge. So it’s fairly rare, and part of the reason I believe that there isn’t a lot of information widely dispersed about sarcomas is that they occur in all different parts of the body. So there isn’t a lot of focus on necessarily how to treat them.
But, anyway, so when I was originally diagnosed with my fibrosarcoma, it was caught in the fairly early stages. It was behind my right nostril, and you could kind of feel it in my hard palate above my two front teeth. I was basically not too concerned about it because originally the doctor had diagnosed it as a pimple, if you can believe that, and I knew better than that, being a 20-year-old male who had had many of those. But I was patient and went back to the doctor three weeks later. They determined that it was a tumor or a cyst that needed to be excised, but it took five weeks to get the diagnosis, again because it went from one lab to the next before they were actually able to provide that diagnosis. So the shock of it all wasn’t probably as great as a lot of people would experience getting a diagnosis of cancer, probably because I had started preparing myself after a few weeks, knowing that I didn’t have a result, it wasn’t a good sign. But I was able to go to the hospital, get the rest of the tumor cleaned out, and I was given a clean bill of health, and that was pretty significant in that I suddenly felt like, “Hey, I’ve already beat this cancer. This is no big deal.” I didn’t need radiation. I didn’t need chemotherapy. I returned to school right away. Continued to kind of fall back into the old mode of things, and I looked like I had been in a fight maybe with someone but not something. I had a tiny little scar on my nose that healed. Everything was okay. …read the rest of this entry»

Background
Hi. My name is Susan. I’m 43 years old, a third-generation Japanese American, sensei born in Oakland, California and I now live in San Diego with my husband, Rob, have two stepdaughters and an 11-month-old grandson, and until last week, I had three wonderful dogs. Sadly, my Nikki girl, a beautiful 8-year-old boxer, developed a brain tumor, and although she wasn’t in pain, she was no longer able to run and play and it broke my heart to see that she no longer had quality of life so we decided to put her down on Tuesday. Nikki and her brother Zek came to live with me a week after I finished chemotherapy for my primary cancer. She was only 8 years old, and my heart is broken. I really miss her.
An Important Step
But, let me tell you about my experience with cancer. I never thought about breast cancer before, never did breast self exams, except once in a blue moon, but I decided I should take the American Cancer Society special touch course on breast self exam, at the request of a friend of mine who was teaching a class. I learned a lot about breast cancer that day, like, how it affects one in eight women in their lifetimes in the United States and how a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer every 3 minutes, another woman will die of breast cancer every 11 minutes. The United States, among the things you learn about breast self-exam, among the things you learn in the BSE class, the breast self exam course, are the incidence and mortality rates for breast cancer in different ethnic groups. And they told us that if you’re an Asian or Pacific Islander woman, ATI, you have the lowest incidence of breast cancer in the United States, and you kind of learn what you’re doing, you’re gonna lay that in while you’re doing your self breast exam. I was pretty sure I had no risk for breast cancer, but I thought I should be active in my own health care and started doing monthly BSE after I took that class, and that was in January of 1991. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Sue. I am fifty years old. I’m married, with three children and three grandchildren. My home is in Ohio, but we are in Florida, since my husband was diagnosed with tongue cancer on April 28, 1997. For me it all began when Joe came home to Ohio from his job in the Caribbean Islands unexpectedly. He just walked in the house, and simply said, “I have cancer.” He wanted to tell me in person and not over the phone. Still, to this day, I cannot believe how calm I was. I know God had his loving hand on me. And I went to our family doctor the next day in Ohio, and we could tell she knew nothing about the type of cancer Joe had. We had the MRI with us from a specialist in Florida. Without a biopsy, they were 99% sure it was malignant. Squamous cell carcinoma. Those words will stay with me forever. The specialist in Florida had told Joe he could not do the type of radical surgery he needed, but he mentioned a wonderful team of doctors in Miami who do it all the time for a living. Still in our family doctor’s office at home in Ohio, we started to get a hassle about our insurance. Since Joe and I had prayed the night before for God to guide us, I just looked up and said, “We’re going to those doctors in Miami.”
A tough decision
Now, you must know I’m from a small town. I love the country living that I had in Ohio, and I still can’t believe I was saying, “Let’s go to Miami”. We did some research and we found out how serious and deadly this type of cancer is. I quit my job at home, after 27 years of being a hairdresser. Joe talked to most of our family and friends the next day, mainly because he knew there was a great possibility he would not speak again after the surgery, and because we would be so far away from everyone. I knew in my heart we were doing the right thing. The next day, Joe and me and our daughter packed a suitcase and headed for Miami in our car. We stayed at a hotel in Deerfield Beach, Florida, that Joe’s company used to put him up in lots of times when he traveled to the Caribbean Islands. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Stanley. I live in a suburb outside of the Big Apple, and it has been my primary residence for about the last 42, 43 years. I built one of the first little California redwood ranches in the suburban area. I had a fantastic, happy married life raising three children and bringing them into this world, and enjoying their development and growth. Unfortunately, my wife became ill and through several complications she passed away some 15 years ago. And I have been left to enjoy my children by myself, and she has been cheated.
A Lucky Early Detection
About three years ago, I went to an emergency room, because I suffer from a chronic disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], which I started developing at 15 when I started smoking and went through the army, went through married life. Bottom line, I smoked for the best part of it. Because I was fortunate enough to go to a rehab for COPD, I was aware enough what to look for. I became worried one weekend when I had more difficulty than I had been experiencing. Very quickly I went to an emergency room just to have my blood stats checked, to make sure everything was OK and I was getting adequate oxygen. Bottom line, out of the serendipity of going for one thing, I was fortunate enough to have an ER doctor–I was blessed–to find that I had a sign on my lung that indicated something was new in there. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Skip. I’m 71 years old, shortly to be 72. I live in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. I’m divorced and have four grown children. Other than that, there’s nothing particularly outstanding.
The episode that I had–and still have consequences from–was pancreatic cancer. The first symptoms appeared July 5, 1988. So that makes me 14 years down the road. I was 57 at the time, and had led a pretty healthy life. I had never been to a hospital for any reason except a broken leg–nothing really serious that I could think of. And I was also at the point in my life where I hadn’t ever really faced mortality. And so I didn’t think about it much.
But about five months prior to the first symptoms, I started to get a feeling that I wasn’t going to see 1989. Somehow I wasn’t going to get through the year. And that feeling persisted and actually grew stronger over the next few months. For some strange reason, I wasn’t upset with it–it was just like some kind of a quiet knowledge. Of course, feeling more or less immortal, I probably ignored it more than anything else.
The morning of July 5, 1988, I awoke and noticed that my eyes and my skin had taken on an orange cast, but I felt fine, I was in no discomfort. And that was a Saturday, so on Monday I called an internist that I had been to before–I very rarely went to the doctor prior to this–and had an appointment that afternoon.
Of course, the first thoughts coming from him were that it might be gallstones or something dealing with the gallbladder. Some tests were taken and sonograms were done, and so on. Anyway, that turned up negative. Then there were a number of tests after that, all of which weren’t really showing anything. And then finally on an X-ray, there was a tiny–there was a small shadow at the neck of the pancreas. So at that point, the diagnosis was painless jaundice. …read the rest of this entry»

I am Shou-I Wang Hsu, 63 years old. I was born and raised in mainland China but I received all my education–from early elementary and middle school through college–in Taiwan. I came to the United States after I was married, and I did not continue my studies after I came to the US. I have two children. I am getting old now. I stopped working in 1993 and our children have grown up and moved out. We have become what people call an “empty nest.” This is my personal background.
A Case of Chronic Misdiagnosis
My case of cancer took place in January of 1994. I remember that I had been sneezing every day and bleeding a lot. The blood would soak through a whole sheet of tissue. I thought it was strange and I put the tissue into a plastic bag. I took it along to see my primary care doctor, Dr. L. He looked at my condition and warned me,”Oh, many Chinese people have this kind of cancer and you should be prepared for if it turns out to be cancer.” The first time I heard about the cancer, I was quite nervous. I said, “What should I do?” He wanted me to have x-rays to see if it really was a cancer, so I went to the hospital and had an x-ray. When the report came back, it was fine, so I felt very relieved. However, after four or five months, I found my bleeding not only came out of my nose, there was a little blood that came out from my throat every day. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Shui Yee Lai–people call me Ah Yee. I am 68 years old and currently living in San Francisco with my husband, my son, my daughter in-law and a granddaughter. I emigrated to the U.S. from China in 1990 and have worked at a sewing factory along with doing housework for the past few years.
I’m Menopausal–Why Am I Bleeding?
Starting in the later part of 1994, I noticed pains around my waist and two feet. It was very uncomfortable, but sometimes when I gave it a rest, I would feel a little better. At that time I thought it was because of my aging. These commonly seen waist and bone aches are considered normal, so I was not bothered by it. Suddenly I had a bad stomach ache, and blood came out in a bright red color, just like a typical menstrual flow, and it stopped after two or three days. Actually my menstruation had stopped ten years earlier. I had never had this happen before, and I could see something wasn’t right. It had stopped so long before and came back suddenly, plus the stomach ache.
At that time I did not have any medical insurance, because I had just arrived in the U.S and I wasn’t doing too well financially. So, I did not have medical insurance coverage. To find out what was wrong, I went to the local community health center to have a gynecological checkup. After the checkup, the doctor thought there seemed to be a problem, but he wasn’t sure what it was. The doctor immediately transferred me to the women’s clinic to have further exams. …read the rest of this entry»

Sharon Wilkins: a ten-year survivor
My name is Sharon and I live in Arizona and I’m an early childhood educator of thirty years, and I’m a cancer survivor of ten years. So I’m just thrilled to think that I’ve made it to ten years, and I want to share my story with other people who are being diagnosed, perhaps with breast cancer, like I was, to give you hope. And to be an encourager and not to be frozen in fear, so I want to share a little bit.
The initial discovery
Ten years ago I was 47, I’ve always been extremely healthy, and our two daughters, Jen, was 13 at the time, and Mel was 10. One day I was out walking, my husband and I, and the only way I can describe it is that when we were walking, I felt kind of like, I know it sounds strange, but I felt like a heat sensation in my left breast, and I said to my husband, Gosh, that’s kind of strange, it feels kind of warm right there. And he said, well maybe it’s just hormonal, and I was an early menopausal woman, at about 44 or 45, and so I thought well, possibly. And we were walking the next day and I had the same heat sensation in the same spot. And we talked about it briefly and I thought, gosh, it’s strange, though, I’ve never really felt that before and especially two consecutive days so I wasn’t really due for a mammogram for six or seven months and this was like in June. But I thought, I’m not gonna take any chances. And you know at the time I didn’t think well what caused that, was that God leading me in some way or but I just felt that for some reason I needed to be aggressive and maybe go early for my mammogram, and that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t dismiss it for whatever reason at the time and I’m so thankful I did go down. …read the rest of this entry»