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. On a cold winter day, my family was getting ready to meet at my grandma’s house like we had done our whole lives. Christmas was one of the most important days of the year for the Robertson’s. Each aunt made entrées and deserts along with the delicious food that my grandma made each year. Food and family were the two main reasons everyone loved Christmas. On the way to Triune where my family lives, my mother started to cry which I thought was odd for …show more content…
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
In 1998, the most common cause of child and adolescents death claimed approximately 2500 young lives in the United States alone. The cause of this dreadful loss of life was due to childhood cancers. This paper explores the changes in the life of children dealing with cancer, families that have been affected by these diseases (also known as pediatric cancer) and a small part of the journey they experience. Cancer does not discriminate and affects all members of the family unit. This paper investigates the challenges that a family will experience from the first diagnoses through palliative care. It examines research and statistic about childhood cancer from organization as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the National Cancer Institute's (NCI), Children’s Cancer Research Fund (CCRF), and other cancer research organization. Although there are 12 major types of cancers that affect children, the main focus in this paper will be acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). It will also include an interview, the personal experiences of a family, real life emotions, and the effect on the parents and sibling of the (Ashtyn) child presently facing acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Life is no longer what formerly was known as being normal. Life with cancer becomes a new journey, the new normal family life that, unfortunately is not normal, but a life that includes cancer.
When I was younger, I remember feeling as though I lived in a bubble; my life was perfect. I had an extremely caring and compassionate mother, two older siblings to look out for me, a loving grandmother who would bake never ending sweets and more toys than any child could ever realistically play with. But as I grew up my world started to change. My sister developed asthma, my mother became sick with cancer and at the age of five, my disabled brother developed ear tumors and became deaf. As more and more problems were piled upon my single mother’s plate, I, the sweet, quiet, perfectly healthy child, was placed on the back burner. It was not as though my family did not love me; it was just that I was simply, not a priority.
When my grandmother was told that she had breast cancer first time, she decided to cure it with non-Western healing method. She went to a sort of temple that heal and improve one's body condition from detoxing and changing one's diet. At the temple, she had taken enzyme sand bath twice a day, had fasted for a week or more, and had eaten healthy addictive free food. The people at the temple said that cancer or any kind of sickness would come from what we consume in daily life. Therefore, they tried to cure health problems from changing one's diet and consequently improve one's potential body condition. Actually, from this treatment, my grandmother's cancer went away. However, after a couple years from that, she started eating unhealthy again,
Cancer. The word by itself can conjure images of severely ill and frail people attached to IV medications and chemotherapy drugs as they cling to life in a hospital bed. Other illustrations and pictures depict unrecognizable, misshaped organs affected by abnormal cells that grow out of control, spread, and invade other parts of the body. Cancer studies show that close to one-half of all men and one-third of all women in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer during their lives. Today, millions of people are living with cancer or have had cancer. As patients are newly diagnosed with their specific type of cancer, whether it be breast, lung, prostate, skin, or blood cancer, etc., each patient has to consider what will happen with their future health care plan and who will be involved in their long journey from treatment to recovery. Once diagnosed, cancer patients become the focal point and the center of all activity in terms of care but cancer not only physically invades the patient’s body and well-being, it goes beyond the patient and significantly affects the emotional stability and support from from their loved ones and caregivers. Based on the insidious nature of cancer and typically late detection of malignant diseases, family members (either spouses, children, parents, other relatives, and friends) often become the patient's main caregiver. These caregivers, also known as informal caregivers, provide the cancer patient with the majority of the support outside of the medical facility or hospital environment and become the primary person to provide various types of assistance. They provide the physical support with bathing and assisting in activities of daily living, they become emotional ...
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.
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...
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.
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.
"Ring, ring", I wondered who was calling me at this time of evening. "Yes; o.k.; Yes, I'll be there", I said before hanging up the phone. What was wrong, I wondered all that evening that the doctor wanted me to come in to discuss my lab results? I had never been asked to come in to the office after doing blood tests before; when receiving a call as this the mind plays tricks on the person and wild things start popping up in the head.
It was August 8th of 2013 when my dad got a call from my Aunt Theresa. She urged him to come over to her house because she had devastating news. The car ride to her house was quiet. The weather was gloomy, the sky was filled with dark cumulus clouds.When we pulled up to my Aunt’s house, the adults were organized into a small circle. My uncles were supporting my grandma, however, I thought nothing of it. My parents had told me to go inside because they had a matter to attend to. I went inside to hang out with my cousins. I saw them a couple days before, but the feeling of happiness never subsides when I see them.
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.
She began to suffer from hair and weight loss as well as the color change of her skin. My mind began to intersect with thoughts of her dying from cancer. I decided negativity would no longer control my thoughts; I had a grandmother who needed me to be strong and think positive about her condition, regardless of the situation and her physical changes. During the time of my grandmother chemotherapy treatments, I would miss school to attend her appointments. As a sophomore in high school, I could only miss a small amount of days before any negative effects displayed toward my grades. Therefore, I would miss school every Tuesday and Thursday for the next four months of my first semester of tenth grade. I didn’t mind because my grandmother meant the world to me and I would have done it a thousand times, if I was given the
As a child, life was great for me. I spent my days being a hyperactive boy, running around and causing general chaos on my two sisters, Kelly and Libby. The world I lived in was a stress free world, I had not had many difficult experiences growing up. Life was beautiful for me, until a tragedy struck my family.
This all suddenly changed the day my dad got home early from work with a harsh pain in his lower spine. It was so bad he found it hard to sit up straight; he had to be lying down to lessen the pain. One night the pain got really bad that my mom had to rush my dad to the hospital. It was 4 in the morning! My mom rushed me and my 3 younger siblings to get ready, I didn’t know if to be scared or nervous at the fact of taking my dad to the hospital or mad because she woke us up that early. We spent countless hours at the hospital and throughout that time all kinds of thoughts came through my head. “Will my dad be okay?” My grandma came to pick us up early and took us to her house. My parents came home the next day and called everyone into the room. My dad has cancer. He had a tumor on his spine and it was cancerous, that was what was causing ...
...n tell us that we can support one another for cancers. There are numerous good things that can come out of media, but we must know the difference between what is good and what is not.