Narrative Essay On Cancer

723 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Having parents with cancer essay

A couple years ago, when I was around 9 or 10, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. That may sound awful, and it is, but my family and I knew that he would be alright. It scared me at the time, being a kid and all, that he could die. All I had ever heard was that cancer killed. Anyways, the treatments began shortly after and I never really saw him. Between treatments, travel, and the need for rest, he was never around. The few times my sisters and I did see him, they were too scared to be around him. The cancer infected his throat, due to a history of smoking, so he had tubing going into his stomach so he could eat. The pastiness of his skin frightened them as well. The look of sorrow on his face, knowing my sisters were uneasy, discouraged me deeply. I begged that he would get better and everything would go back to the way they used to. Overtime the situation lightened and my dad was finally free of cancer.

Day, weeks, and months went by, and life was beginning to return to normal. My dad was looking very well, coming along with his recovery, and my sister weren't startled by his appearance. All seemed still until….Bam, right under our noses came the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas. I was thrilled, Christmas was something …show more content…

I went to my mom, knowing who the real Santa was, and asked her why I didn’t get any more present. She said very apologetically, “I’m sorry honey, we didn’t have a lot of money this year.” You see, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the cancer treatments cost a lot of money. Everything my dad went through that past year really hit my family hard, not only emotionally but financially. It was probably the first time in my life where I understood the complexity of adulthood, and realized everything wasn’t hearts and rainbows. I felt guilty and horrible. I couldn’t believe how selfish I was. I really had to think about where I had gone

Show More
Related

  • Personal Essay: How Cancer Has Changed My Family

    668 Words  | 2 Pages

    Living our busy lives no one else in the family could travel to Houston. Grandma was a strong woman. She could overcome anything and cancer was not going to defeat her. When she arrived at the hospital the doctors took a cat scan and figured out that she had stage four melanoma skin cancer. While my mother and grandma were at M.D. Anderson I was at home living a normal life just starting my first high school basketball season. Every night I worried about how she was doing not thinking about my school work or my athletics. A couple weeks later I called grandma and asked her how she was doing and she assured me that everything was going to be okay and that I should not worry about her. That’s how she lived. She never put herself first in any situation and family and friends were her main focus. Grandma would do anything to make her grandkids happy. I told my grandma I loved her and hung up the phone. The next day at school I looked up the percentage of people killed by melanoma skin cancer and the results were not good. One person dies of melanoma every 54 minutes. When I got home that evening I told my dad that I needed to be in Houston with my grandma. He said he didn’t think that he could make it happen with his busy schedule. I called my mom upset realizing that

    Read More

  • Cancer Observation Essay

    518 Words  | 2 Pages

    I have chosen to write about the constellation Cancer (The Crab). I chose Cancer because it is one of only a handful of constellations that I am actually able to identify in the night sky. Cancer is one of the twelve Zodiac constellations; people whose birthdays fall between June 21st and July 22nd have Cancer as their sign. Cancer is the Latin word for crab, and despite the fact that the constellation looks more like a lobster then a crab, it is still referred to as a crab. The constellation is visible from the northern hemisphere from late winter to early spring.

    Read More

  • Ovarian Cancer Essay

    935 Words  | 2 Pages

    A mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene is associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer

    Read More

  • Understanding Lung Cancer: Causes, Diagnosis and Treatment

    1860 Words  | 4 Pages

    Diagnosed with lung cancer, now what!? Time to do some research. Lung cancer is the number one cause of deaths in males and females. The causes, diagnosis, and treatment of lung cancer have advanced recently with new technology available to scientists and the medical profession. Lung cancer develops when the cells grow abnormally and tumors form instead of healthy lung tissue. It can take place in one or both lungs, normally the cells that line the air passages. Not all tumors are cancerous, the ones that do not spread are benign tumors. The more tumors that develop in the lungs will cause the lungs to work less efficiently. The metastatic tumors spread to other parts of the body passing through the blood stream or lymphatic system.

    Read More

  • Treatments For Cancer Essay

    1285 Words  | 3 Pages

    Almost everyone is touched by cancer in some way and the number of people living with and beyond cancer grows greater every year. Globally 14 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year and 8 million people will die from it annually. Half of all men and one-third of all women will develop cancer during their lifetime. (13) There are many treatments for cancer, mainly: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. These traditional treatments have many negative side effects. Therefore, increasingly, other treatments, such as hormonal therapy and targeted therapy are being used for certain cancers. Nanotechnology is a form of targeted therapy that destroys cancer tumors with minimal damage to healthy tissues and organs. Scientists are already using nanotechnology in early detection of elimination of cancer cells before they form tumors. But the real game changer will be when nanotechnology targets cancer tumors in treatment (11,13).

    Read More

  • Cancer Essay

    685 Words  | 2 Pages

    Cancer has become the one of the most feared things for human beings. The various type of cancer have been discovered and there are still a lot of it that undiscoverable. Cancer is a complex disease that have a group of disease. The cancer itself cannot be describe by words. The causes of this cancer is still not being able to be discovered fully. There are only minor factor that can lead to this disease. The carcinogens are believed to be one of the causes that lead to cancer such as asbestos, radon gas, tobacco, PVC and much more from our chemical industries. The environment especially near to the industrial that produce chemical waste can be one of the causes lead to cancer. Cancer also have relation with our age, lifestyle, and diet and also can be genetically inherited. It is believed that older people have higher tendency to get cancer than younger people. Our lifestyle and diet also plays a role causing a cancer by our daily life routine. Smoking tobacco and eating unconsciously (still in research) can also increase the possibility to get cancer especially lung cancer that cause by smoking tobacco. There are several cases, cancer were inherited from their parents. Various type of viruses such as HIV, HPV, EBV and many more virus has a high capabilities to increase the chance a patient to get a cancer because these viruses lower their body immunity to disease.

    Read More

  • Cancer Essay

    2277 Words  | 5 Pages

    Cancer has become a very common illness world wide for any age but mostly affecting adults. One can get cancer from different places in the body that is why there are so many people with cancer, because of all the different types. Cancer can affect any gender, female or male, and any age. It varies from ovarian cancer to prostate cancer, skin cancer to lukemia. Cancer has been a problem for many years yet we have not found a cure to treat and prevent cancer. If one is affected by cancer there are treatments to help take away this illness affecting their body. This essay is about a specific type of treatment for cancer, radiation therapy. There are different types of forms of particles for radiation, for example, protons and waves like x-rays and visible light. These types of radiations are grouped on how much energy they contain because it can cause different affects. A low type of energy radiation can be radio waves and heat, also known as non-ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation has enough energy to break chemical bonds and knock electrons out of atoms, some examples of these are x-rays and ultraviolet light rays from the sun. That is why radiation is a way to treat cancer because of the strong energy it has to destroy a cancer cell, actually any cell in the body. That’s the issue with radiation therapy, is it worth the damage? It can damage any cell, wether it is healthy or cancerous, which can cause a major affect in the body later on. Although it sounds scary there are other types of treatments such as chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, photodynamic therapy, etc. So if radiation therapy does not sound like the best there are always other options but they do not develop the same results for radiation therapy. Rad...

    Read More

  • Essay On Lung Cancer

    750 Words  | 2 Pages

    Ostrow, N. (2011). Screening for lung cancer with chest x-ray doesn’t cut deaths, study finds. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-26/screening-for-lung-cancer-with-chest-x-rays-doesn-t-cut-deaths.html.

    Read More

  • Cancer Essay

    741 Words  | 2 Pages

    Cancer is a deadly disease that affects millions of American families each year. In cancer, cell division isn't controlled. Usually, cells have to go through a set of checks and balances before they divide, in cancer that is nonexistent. The cells just keep duplicating until they eventually form disorganized clumps called tumors. Tumors can either be, benign, meaning that they do not possess the power to metastasize to surrounding areas. If a tumor has the power to metastasize, it is classified as a malignant tumor. In simple terms, a benign tumor is not cancerous, and a malignant tumor is. Cancer cells cannot perform the necessary functions they were created for. Some types of cancers, like pancreatic cancer, cannot be cured. Other cancers such as melanoma and breast cancer have high survival rates when caught early. The four major types of treatments used to treat cancer include, surgery to remove the affected organ, radiation, chemotherapy, or biological treatments.

    Read More

  • Lung Cancer Essay

    720 Words  | 2 Pages

    The leading cause of death in America is lung cancer. Lung cancer is ranked top 10 fatal cancers in the United States. There are many types of ways to get lung cancer. There is radon gas it occurs outdoors naturally. Then there is second hand smoke that comes from other people smoking. People are even getting lung cancer from cancer causing agents, this happens from carcinogens. You can also get it from air pollution indoors and outdoors. Also there are gene-mutations that form cancer causing cells. Then there is the one everyone blamed lung cancer is smoking.

    Read More

  • Cancer Essay

    1669 Words  | 4 Pages

    Cancer has been seen in humans as one the most potentially fatal disease for thousands of years and only in the recent couple of hundred years have we discovered that most information necessary to bring us to today’s understanding and knowledge (Kenny 2007, Weinberg 1996) was achieved by extensive research of cells, DNA, and epidemiology studies. As we know, currently cancer is acknowledged as having over a hundred different diseases, and is known to be the result of mutations of the genes and almost similar DNA which are responsible for the amount of cell division and production (Kenny 2007). Restraint of cell growth modulators can be a direct lead and result of certain tumours being developed and subsequently allow these tumours to acquire the ability to attack and occupy the bloodstream and essentially be able to travel via the bloodstream to other parts and organs in human bodies which is known as metastasis (Loeb et Al 2003). Once this has occurred , the cancer is then categorized as malicious and becomes a dangerous and serious threat to the carrier (Weinberg 1996). In this essay I will describe and explain the process of this and how our genes mutate and lead to metastasis of cancer cells.

    Read More

  • Cause Of Cancer Essay

    1470 Words  | 3 Pages

    Epidemiologists had identified many important causes of cancer by the early of 1980s. Many types of cancer vary in incidence by more than an order of magnitude between different populations and every type is rare in some part of the world. Many specific causes cancer are now known, the most common are by smoking, obesity and a few oncogenic viruses, but a large proportion of global variation for common cancers such as breast, prostate, colon and rectum remains unexplained (Peto J. , 2001). According to Richard Doll and Richard Peto, pollution accounts for 2% of all cancer cases and geophysical factors account for another 3% while 80% to 90% of cancers are caused by “environmental factors”. Environmental factors are the non-genetic factors which are smoking, diet, occupational exposure to chemicals and geophysical factors (naturally occurring radiation, man-made radiation, medical drugs and radiation and pollution.

    Read More

  • Personal Narrative: My Father's Battle With Cancer

    998 Words  | 2 Pages

    Imagine having to wake up each day wondering if that day will be the last time you see or speak to your father. Individuals should really find a way to recognize that nothing in life is guaranteed and that they should live every day like it could be there last. This is the story of my father’s battle with cancer and the toll it took on himself and everyone close to him. My father was very young when he was first diagnosed with cancer. Lately, his current health situation is much different than what it was just a few months ago. Nobody was ready for what was about to happen to my dad, and I was not ready to take on so many new responsibilities at such an adolescent age. I quickly learned to look at life much differently than I had. Your roles change when you have a parent who is sick. You suddenly become the caregiver to them, not the other way around.

    Read More

  • The Death of my Father

    874 Words  | 2 Pages

    It was Friday night, I took a shower, and one of my aunts came into the bathroom and told me that my dad was sick but he was going to be ok. She told me that so I did not worry. I finished taking a bath, and I immediately went to my daddy’s house to see what was going on. My dad was throwing-up blood, and he could not breath very well. One of my aunts cried and prayed at the same time. I felt worried because she only does that when something bad is going to happen. More people were trying to help my dad until the doctor came. Everybody cried, and I was confused because I thought it was just a stomachache. I asked one of my older brothers if my dad was going to be ok, but he did not answer my question and push me away. My body shock to see him dying, and I took his hand and told him not to give up. The only thing that I heard from him was, “Daughters go to auntie...

    Read More

  • My Childhood Memories of Christmas

    658 Words  | 2 Pages

    Christmas was always a big event in our family. We always spent Christmas Eve with my father's family and Christmas Day with my mom's. There was always a lot of food and many gifts, but for the first four or five years of my life, I had no clue what we were celebrating. I really don't think I cared too much, being a young child caught up in all the excitement. And I had something to call it. Christmas. That's all I really needed until I stumbled upon a Christmas special on television entitled A Charlie Brown Christmas. I must have been four or five years old at the time, I can't remember for sure, but I don't think I had started kindergarten yet. But I know I was curled up in a Sesame Street sleeping bag in front of our old television set, one of the small older models instead of the giant entertainment centers like we have now.

    Read More

More about Narrative Essay On Cancer

Open Document