Lisa: head and neck cancer survivor
Hi. I’m Lisa from Tampa, Florida. I’m a ten-year cancer survivor. I was first diagnosed, gosh, in 1989, and I had head and neck cancer, I had a tumor on my tongue, and that was removed and I had surgery and then about a year-and-a-half later, I had a recurrence on my neck. That time I had surgery and radiation. That was the more difficult part of the process, was the second surgery. I was working during the entire time I was having the radiation. One of the things I had to deal with was the work environment. Learning to talk with people about my illness. At that time, cancer was a death sentence, and a lot of people didn’t understand what was going on. I felt like I had to do a lot of education of my coworkers and my boss, and I did lose a job or two, and I think because of the illness. But now, fortunately, things have changed quite a bit. You can be more open about it and talk with our bosses, I think, and that’s a good thing.
Educate yourself
My advice for people, now I was young, I was 27 years old when I was diagnosed, so it really threw me for a loop. It was kind of like a three-year curve in my life, where I had to deal with a divorce, and losing, having cancer, and losing my job. So I advise people to get as much education as you can about your illness. If you can’t do it, see if you can find an advocate who will do that for you, a sister, a brother, an uncle, whoever, somebody you trust. You’re gonna have to deal with financial issues, along with your illness, so you really need as much support around you as you can find. My family was invaluable, but the big thing for me was finding folks about my age and had cancer, because there are so many issues when you’re young and you’re just starting out your career, and you get this information, you know. I got it over the phone, it was very strange, a lot of people don’t have a good bedside manner. The doctor I had at the time was treating me like a five-year-old, basically, and ooh, that’s a big word he used and I’m like, okay, I’m gonna go to a cancer center that specializes in this. …read the rest of this entry»

Lillie’s experience with breast cancer
Hi. I’m Lillie. I’m 46 years old and live in Reisterstown, Maryland, have been married 22 years and have one daughter who is 20, almost 21 years old. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 38 and I have to say that I consider myself the poster child for mammography, because of the way in which I was diagnosed. I found a lump in my right breast while doing a breast self exam which is what prompted me to contact my doctor and arrange for a mammogram. And when the mammogram was done, they found that I had a cyst in my right breast, which was why I felt that lump, and they drained that cyst while I was there in mammography. But they also did a baseline mammogram, since I was between the ages of 35 and 40, on my left breast, and ironically enough, that is where they found something suspicious that warranted a biopsy. When the biopsy was done I got the surprise of my life and learned that in fact I did have breast cancer.
Meeting Betty Boob
I’m a registered nurse. I’ve taken care of thousands of women who have been diagnosed with this disease, and never possibly imagined that I would end up one day also being in their club, ending up being diagnosed as well. I initially was in shock, just really couldn’t believe it, because I had no known risk factors, but seventy percent of women diagnosed today with breast cancer, also have no known risk factors. I had what is referred to as “multi-focal disease”, though it was early stage, and rather than being a good candidate for lumpectomy, I needed to default to do mastectomy. I also wasn’t a strong candidate for breast reconstruction due to a history of anesthesia complications in the past, so I knew that I would be going with a breast prosthesis and I decided to name my prosthesis, and her name is “Betty Boob”. I even sent out adoption notices when I got her, with her name and her dimensions and her weight and her size. And a girl friend of mine mailed her, addressed to Betty Boob, in care of Lillie, a gift in the mail, and it was a ceramic Christmas ornament in the shape of a baby bottle. And inscribed on it it says, “Betty Boob’s first Christmas, 1992″, and we keep that ornament displayed in our living room year round. Because the invasive part of my cancer was extremely tiny, and the majority of the disease was DCIS, I did not need chemotherapy, and because I had had a mastectomy with negative lymph nodes, I did not need radiation. I did, however, go on hormonal therapy, which I now have completed. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Krystal. I’m 28 years old. I’m living in Texas, married, and I have a 13-month-old daughter. My story is about my sister, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease when I was 10 years old. She was 13 years old at the time. What happened was she found a lump on her neck and Mom took her to the doctor. They removed the lump and that’s how they diagnosed it as Hodgkin’s’ disease. When the lump was removed they ran more tests. They started her on radiation and I think they staged her as IIA at that time.
So after she was diagnosed, she had her spleen removed. Once her radiation treatments were done, she went into remission for about six years. So, throughout most of her high school years, she was cancer-free. When she was 19 years old, the cancer came back. This was in 1989. This time they treated it with radiation and chemo. I just remember my parents always taking her to the doctor all the time, getting some sort of test or treatment or anything else, throughout high school. After I graduated from high school, I moved to Phoenix. My sister stayed in California, living with my parents for a couple more years. …read the rest of this entry»

Lee: stomach cancer survivor
I’m Lee, I’m from Nebraska, I’m 66 years old. I was born and raised on a farm and still live in a small community. I’m a retired dietitian, and I’m a widow. I have one child, who’s very dear to me, and also a couple grandchildren. My problem with cancer began the winter of 1998. After several tests, I was diagnosed with Signet Cell Stomach Cancer. As a result the doctors totally removed my stomach and made me a small pouch out of small intestines. After I healed up, I took chemo and radiation, until they finally stopped it because it burnt me inside. I was getting along very well, but I have to eat small amounts. You can’t seem to stretch out that pouch like you do a normal stomach. So my word is I graze every day. I eat a small, two small breakfasts, I eat a lunch and then a small after lunch and then later on in the day I eat again, but I do kind of graze through the day. …read the rest of this entry»

Lee: Life throws a curveball
My name is Lee and I’m 53 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington and I’ve been married for 31 years this year. Two children, one nine and one twenty. What happened to me was in an interview for an executive level position in 1995 I was preparing to move on to the next level in my career which would have been Chief Executive Officer of a program in Seattle. In the process of being interviewed, I got sick. Couldn’t respond to the questions, immediately left and went to a hospital for diagnosis, because I knew I wasn’t well, and after the diagnosis I was told that I had something called adenocarcinoma, which I didn’t know anything about, which later I learned a whole lot about and the diagnosis suggested that I did have a cancerous tumor, a softball-sized tumor in my stomach, and was scheduled for surgery a day after they diagnosed me. So I was pretty severe. And what happened next was, obviously I was in shock, and the way I got the story was not from the doctor, it was from the nurse who told me I had been diagnosed with cancer, so with my wife present, it was pretty shocking for both of us.
Setting priorities
So the summer of 95 was a summer of anticipation and fear. What did I do? Well, what I did was I sat down and I looked at my world, and after getting through the anger phase and the shock phase and the Why Me? Phase, I decided to go and do what I had to do and face what those alternatives you really do come to reality in a reasonable amount of time, and you start doing what’s most important. So I essentially pared down my world, focused on truly the most important thing, which was my family, being involved with the family of course and the finances and of course my health and spiritual peace. But I also prepared myself by the end of summer of 95 to be here on their own and to leave my choices, actually 50-50, this is what the doctor had told me, I had a 50-50 chance of survival. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Laura. I am 27 years old. I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and I live in Florida with my two children-Andres, who is 5 years old, and Maria who is 7 months old. In the spring of 1999, I was living in Gainesville, Florida. I was attending the University of Florida obtaining my Master’s in Computer Science. One day at the university, I had my hand on my neck and I felt that I had a little ball on the left-hand side of it. I felt that it was hard and solid.
The Road to Diagnosis
The truth is that, at that moment, I had a great deal of work, final exams were near. I had to finish my projects and I was also working, assisting a professor. I would correct exams and assignments. So I decided to wait a while to see if it went away on its own.
Two or three weeks passed and I completed everything. The semester finished. I had been more or less paying attention to the little ball and I knew that it had not left, but nor had it gotten bigger or smaller. In other words, it hadn’t changed, so I decided to go to the university clinic to see what they would say about it. There they gave me a physical exam and they took some X-rays, but they could not find anything on the X-rays. The little ball didn’t show up.
So the doctor referred me to a radiology center so they could do a CAT scan. I asked her what she thought it could be and she told me that it could be anything. It could be something benign like a cyst or it could also be something more serious like a tumor in the lymph nodes. For that reason, they had to do more tests to ensure that it wasn’t anything dangerous. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Kong. I’m 50 years old. I am married and have one son and one daughter. I live in Berkeley, California. I moved to the United States more than 30 years ago. The cancer I had was primary liver cancer. I will talk about the discovery of my cancer. Actually, my family doctor was following my health very closely since my blood pressure was a little high and the doctor was treating my hypertension as well. My family doctor wanted me to change to another kind of medication, so he thought I should have a physical checkup, especially blood work. He wanted to see if the new drug would affect my internal organs, such as the liver and kidneys. He would use the reaction as a guideline.
Facing the Diagnosis of Liver Cancer
After the results of the blood tests, within a year and a half, my doctor discovered that the numbers of my platelets were dropping. He started to suspect that there may be too many white blood cells, but after doing the bone marrow test, he could not find anything [wrong]. When he found out that I wasn’t born in the United States, he started to look at the liver, and tried to figure out the reason for me having a low count of the platelets. Initially, he tried to find some treatment [to improve] my liver function. The counts showed that my liver function’s index was much higher than was usual. Then he did an AFP [alpha fetoprotein] and he found out the AFP was also much higher than the normal range. Then he did a CT scan and discovered that my liver showed signs of swelling. After telling me the bad news, he ordered a liver needle biopsy. The pathologist took out some liver tissue for testing, and then the primary liver cancer was confirmed. …read the rest of this entry»

Diagnosis: Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia
My name is Kip. I am 48 years old. I am divorced, although I have a girlfriend now. I have two children. They are now ages 14 and 11.
My story starts in 1996 when I was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia, CML. If you don’t know much about leukemia, there are many different types and they are very different in terms of how dangerous they are and how quickly you have to be treated.
The way I was diagnosed is interesting. I really didn’t have many of the typical symptoms, but I was always very active athletically and over the course of a couple of months when I had been running for a long time, I just got slower and slower. Finally, I just figured I must have mono or something. I went in and had a blood test and that caught it. So there is a lesson there. The doctor said I was very lucky that I was active or it might have been a lot longer before I caught it. It was very easy to diagnose. They do a blood test, and with CML there is a special chromosome that they can prove they know what it is. The problem was, at the time I had been laid off. I have an MBA, I had a senior management position and I was on almost a yearlong severance package when this happened. My immediate concern was will I be able to find a job? I’m going to have to keep this a secret and is it even legal to go ahead and take a job knowing you have cancer? I immediately called a lawyer and I found out not only is it legal, but her quote was, “You’ll have the most safe job, secure job in the world.” I knew that, because as a manager I had been through a lot of training about discriminating against people for any variety of reasons including health. …read the rest of this entry»

Kevin ’s childhood experience with leukemia
My name is Kevin, I am 26 years old, I live in Missouri and I am single. I am a 22-year survivor of leukemia. I was diagnosed when I was two years old. I had been sick occasionally throughout early childhood, and my parents had noticed one afternoon that I had bruises all over my body, which of course was completely uncommon, and also had just come over a case of flu. So my parents took me in to a pediatrician and they ran some tests and suspected that I might have leukemia, and then they took me to a local hospital in the Kent City area and that was where I was diagnosed that I had ALL leukemia. I think one of the most important things for me is probably lucky that I was diagnosed with leukemia at such a young age and actually had it at such a young age. I think the misnomer that people have is that because I was so young I don’t remember any of it, and that it was probably not an important thing for me. But even though I was diagnosed when I was two, I do remember a lot of it, particularly the time that I had to spend in the hospital. As soon as I was diagnosed and went to the local hospital for to get some more diagnosis, I was put in the hospital for ten days, and then managed to be in and out of the hospital for ten day terms up until the time that I was about four years old. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Kathleen. I’m 40 years old. I’m a single parent, a professional woman. My daughter is 14 years old, and I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 38, which is pretty young.
An Unwelcome Diagnosis for a Single Mom
My type of cancer is thyroid cancer, which, as you probably know, is one of the rarest types of cancer. I had had a troubling thyroid for a number of years, and so when my doctors told me that I couldn’t wait any longer to get my thyroid out after a questionable biopsy, I was very, very scared. Very upset. You know, really just terrified, because being a single parent, being a sole source of income, of support and emotional stability, [this] was a big shock to me. I wasn’t done living yet, being only 38. [laughs]
So, I went in for my surgery. Not a whole lot of pain. I have a big scar on the front of my neck, which took me a while to get used to. I call it now my second smile [laughs], and I kind of wear it as a badge of courage. The surgery, like I said, not too much pain afterwards, after the immediate surgery, but lots of pain and trouble with my neck, and then the questions about cancer. When I was in the hospital, I was told they took my entire thyroid and some peritracheal lymph glands, and that they got everything that looked suspicious–is the key word there. So I felt fine. I thought, “Oh good, everything’s fine.” …read the rest of this entry»