Tag: cancer

Diagnosed with breast cancer, Anne Boyer discusses the treatment that is poisoning her body.

Cameron Dezen Hammon reflects on her frustrations as a Christian music minister for the terminally ill, unable to heal a cancer patient she cared for, and struggling to be compassionate at her belligerent Jewish father’s bedside.

Anne Boyer encounters a familiar system — that grand and easy-to-mistake-for-everything system — at the cancer pavilion.

Leigh Hopkins faces the hidden truth about the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon and the irresistible desire to find ‘the cure.’

A daughter recounts her family’s worst day, through her mother’s eyes.

Actor and writer Rob Delaney shares his family’s experience with every parent’s nightmare: a very sick child.

Mary Wang recalls the ways in which she and her family in China conspired to hide her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis from her.

Nell Boeschenstein reflects on the culturally fraught discourse around post-mastectomy reconstruction.

As she lives with terminal cancer, Teva Harrison reflects on how fentanyl is helping her make the most of the time she has left.

Cancer may have claimed Steve Bean Levy’s nose, but not his sense of humor.

A reporter’s North Carolina hometown water supply contaminated millions of people, including her mother and two of her now-deceased brothers.

Privatkliniken in Deutschland verkaufen Krebspatienten Hoffnung zu Höchstpreisen — mit durchwachsenem Erfolg.

Private clinics in Germany sell cancer patients hope — and mixed results — at exorbitant prices. Some, like the Hallwang Clinic, cater primarily to foreigners.

Ken Otterbourg contemplates love and loss and what we remember when we try to forget.

Jacqueline Dooley recalls her difficult transition from being a mother with earthly duties, to becoming one with more spiritual concerns for a teenage daughter with terminal cancer.

To help demystify dying, Cory Taylor answers questions about what it’s like to have a terminal illness.

James Vlahos gave his father eternal life using a little bit of programming.

Gabriele Grunewald’s rare cancer has returned, but the athlete keeps fighting.

In searching for meaning behind a random encounter and his mother’s death, Josh Roiland explores compassion.

Christina Frangou writes on the aftermath of being widowed at age 36.

The first recorded cases of cancer show how the Ancient Egyptians used cauterisation (using red-hot instruments to burn off tissue and seal off wounds) to destroy tumours and to treat a variety of infections, diseases and bleeding lesions. Until the mid-18th century, surgery was the only effective option for addressing several conditions. But it was […]

Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: “It’s everywhere,” he said.

Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The […]

“His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said ‘had […]

“When A Daughter Dies.” — Michael Levitt, Freaknonomics

Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]

A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader: Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle. […]

After a Leukemia doctor and researcher develops the disease himself, he finds an effective treatment when his colleagues sequence his cancer genome: Dr. Wartman’s doctors realized then that their last best hope for saving him was to use all the genetic know-how and technology at their disposal. After their month of frantic work to beat […]

A couple learns about a cancer diagnosis: I watch your hand starting to shake as you write down information that will sit on a small square of paper for months, impossible to get rid of. I stand two feet away and watch your lips. I hear you say, Is that all you can tell me…. […]

How psychedelic drugs are helping terminally ill patients face death: Norbert Litzinger, [Pam] Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still […]