When I first saw Linda Gilik and I was told that I had to listen to her presentation I didn’t fully realize how much it was going to move me. She is a woman who had a healthy baby boy, and then after loving this “normal” child for three months was told that he was diagnosed with cancer of the nervous system. She was very taken back by what she was told and knew that there was something wrong because it came out of no where. It is very rare for a baby to get cancer, this type of cancer occurs in one in a million babies.
She went to Sloan Keteran a world famous cancer hospital in New York City. She was sitting on her sons floor which had 40 beds filled with children patients, and saw that 7 or 8 of tough’s beds were children from Toms River New Jersey. She started talking to some of the parents of the children from Tom’s River and they decided to investigate and maybe find out the reason this was happening to their children. Her son Michael was diagnosed with this cancer in 1979. He is now 25 years old and lives at home. He is a 25 year old in a 7 year olds body because of the cancer and the procedures he has to go through.
After a couple of years of investigations and several years later, a nurse at a hospital in Philadelphia in the cancer ward saw that again a lot of the children that were there were from the same place, Toms River. She called EPA 3 to report what she was seeing; they called EPA 2 who called the New Jersey department of health. Then a man named Michael Berry made a report of what was going on called the Berry report in 1995. This was going on 16 years after Linda’s son Michael was diagnosed, they still didn’t have a clue and the cancer rates of children in Toms River were getting bigger.
Finally, they decided to start testing the water in Toms River to have some kind of clue as to what is happening. When they tested the water from the schools, they found many cancer causing chemicals.
What happened was a man named Mr. Fernicola was supposed to destroy drums full of chemicals. Instead, he was lazy and paid the sanitation workers off so that he can just take them and dump them in the landfill.
Mary Hoge had gone into labor Sunday 23rd of July 1972 giving birth to her fifth child, Robert Hoge. When Robert Hoge was born, his own mother didn’t want him. Robert’s mother Mary thought he was too ugly, that he was, in appearance, a monstrous baby. Robert was born with a tumor the size of a tennis ball right in the middle of his face and with short twisted legs. Robert was born in Australia, where he would have to undergo numerous operations that carried very high risk in order to try and live a “normal” life.
She was a writer who suffered from Lupus. Her father died of the same illness when she was thirteen. Her Catholic beliefs reflected in her work, as well as the implementation of violence and darkness ironically used in her short stories. The titles in the stories give the readers an idea that the stories are the opposite of what the titles really state. She uses metaphors and similes to describe the characters and the settings of the stories. Each story relates to the darkness of the characters: people with racial prejudice, ignorance, and evil. Each story ends in a tragedy. The use of irony allows her to transport a meaning to each story that is not easy for readers to understand.
Pediatric oncology has been so very rewarding in many ways, but also so very cruel in a few ways. The good days are great, but the sad days are heartbreaking. But beyond the death and the suffering, there is a whole other layer of
Progress and innovation are key components to discover new possibilities to fight against childhood cancer. To begin with, my interest in healthcare sparked when I was diagnosed with childhood sarcoma cancer at the age of seven. As a cancer
Wing, Steve et al. "A reevaluation of cancer incidence near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant: The collision of evidence and assumptions." Environmental Health Perspectives, v.105, n.1, January 1997, pp.52-57.
Cancer is a deadly disease that millions of people die from a year. Many loved ones are killed with little to no warning affecting families across our world. My family happened to be one that was affected by this atrocious disease. This event changed the way my family members and I viewed cancer.
Anybody can write and persuade a certain audience, based on how the writer wants their audience to look at the situation. In Steve Earle’s essay “A Death in Texas”, he persuades his readers that he wants to believe that Johnathan Wayne Nobles was rehabilitated. In the essay, Nobles was a changed man within faith from becoming a religious man within the prison walls. Prison guards learned to trust Nobles with his quick-witted charm and friendliness. Steve persuaded himself that Johnathan was a changed man from the words that they had exchanged over the years on paper. Reality states that no matter how much someone changed in the present, it doesn’t change what they have done in the past. Earle describes in the essay “There he will be pumped full of chemicals that will collapse his lungs and stop his heart forever” (Earle 73). He’s persuading the audience with horrid emotion with facts of a lethal injection that will happen to Johnathan. What Earle doesn’t describe is how gruesomely Johnathan’s murders were. In this world everyone has a chance to know right from wrong, even if someone was brought up wrong in the society. Johnathan was not rehabilitated, maybe at one point accepted his past, but he was still a murderer and a
She was a 24-week-old premature infant. I had never seen anything so fragile yet so resilient in my life. Every time she took a breath her lungs would completely collapse. To inhale, she had to pull everything up from on her back, out from her rib cage, and inflate her lungs. She was a powerhouse! Instinctively doing everything she could to stay alive. She died hours later. She was the youngest and smallest infant ever to be born alive at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.We will never know her full potential, and the loss of the opportunity for someone to become an asset to society is something that I cannot tolerate. Thus, my desire to become a neonatologist was affirmed.
Isn’t it overwhelming to consider the fact that approximately one in eight deaths in the world are due to cancer? To make this more comprehensible, the number of deaths caused by cancer is greater than caused by AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Along with the idea that this disease does not have a definite cure is a mind-staggering concept to grasp. If not caught in time, cancer means guaranteed death. These types of thoughts were floating around my head when my mother had told me that my father had mouth cancer.
Cancer is a word which evokes many different images and emotions. Nothing in this world can prepare a person for the utter devastation of finding out someone has been diagnosed with cancer, especially when this person is a child. Over the past twenty five years the amount of research and the survival rate for children suffering with cancer have increased dramatically. Despite these successes, the funding for new research necessary to keep these children alive and healthy is miniscule and too dependent on short term grants. Of the billions of dollars spent each year on cancer treatments and research less than a third is contributed to researching pediatric cancer. Given the media focus on adult cancers, research for pediatric cancer is underfunded. In order to maintain the increasing survival rate of the children undergoing pediatric cancer and support those who have survived the disease, better funding is quintessential to develop and further promote research.
child who was not expected to live, take her first steps after weeks of therapy. The journey to reach my
With all the new homes in the area, an elementary school was opened near the corner of the canal in 1955. Soon after the opening, students and teachers began complaining of being burnt, nauseous odors, and black sludge (Gibbs 21). It wasn’t till nearly thirty years later that the government finally decided to investigate the complaints.
directed her to question what lies behind. Many people in her family were suffering from cancer and
It was believed that it would be cheaper for PG&E to dispose of the chemicals illegally since the company officials were more concerned with the profits than about people's lives. The hiding of this critical information had tragic consequences for the people involved. PG&E must have realized that they were guilty since they settled the case for $330 million in private arbitration. All in all, it probably ended up costing PG&E more money than it would have if they had properly lined the water pools and taken care of things the correct way in the beginning.
When one hears the word “cancer”, thoughts about how their previous life is about to change cloud the mind, but when one hears the word cancer for their child, it is a whole different outlook; the affects of childhood cancer are not only taken on by the patients, but also by their families; the affects can range from emotionally to physically, socially to financially, and even educationally. “Childhood cancer is considered rare, especially compared with adults. Still it’s the leading cause of death in children pre-adolescent, school-aged children” (Report: Childhood Cancer Rates Continue to Rise, but Treatment Helps Drive Down Deaths). Around 12,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with cancer every year and around one in five children that are diagnosed with cancer will die.