Tag Archives: cancer
Prayers for Percy Sledge
Just hear Percy sledge is stricken with Liver Cancer and had to cancel a scheduled show in England. The 73-year-old Sledge, whose classic 1966 hit “When a Man Loves a Woman,” was due to perform as part of producer David Gest’s Legends of Soul tour, but was hospitalized before a concert in Stockport, England
http://www.eurweb.com/2014/02/report-singer-percy-sledge-suffering-from-liver-cancer/
Hot in the Press Kettle September
Jennifer Lopez is returning to her Latin Roots as a producer on where about 30 million viewers will tune into her message. That is not a bad gig at all.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2012-09-11/jennifer-lopez-nuvo-tv/57750774/1
http://www.myspace.com/maikowatsonmusic/music/songs/under-your-spell
Paris Hilton’s homophobic comments causes a stir and triggered an apology from her. Apparently Hilton was disgusted at gay men’s sexual proclivity and suggested they all might be infected with the AIDs Virus or something to that effect.http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2012/09/21/paris-hilton-apologizes-for-comments-about-gay-men-aids/70000835/1?csp=ip
Robin Roberts, anchor on Good Morning America, delayed her bone marrow to be with her beloved mother, 88-year-old mother, Lucimarian Tolliver Roberts during her final hours on this earth. Her mother passed on Thursday 20th , 2012. Here are the moving words of Robin who is fighting for her life:
To help me deal with my immense grief my family tells me momma gave me one final gift as her last act. She waited for me to get home on Thursday to say goodbye. She was there when I took my first breath and what a privilege to hold her sweet hand when she took her last breath.
“Momma knew she wasn’t physically able to be with me for my bone marrow transplant. My siblings say mom wanted to spare me the agony it would have been if she had passed and I couldn’t be there. That thought was weighing heavily on me.
“Momma found a way to be with me every step of the way on my journey. I am humbled by her selflessness.
DO YOU KNOW THE PERSON YOU MARRIED
Check out this link to discover how many people have been fooled and deceive into marrying a family member even their own parent.
In another case, it took Indian bride Minati Khatua of Rourkela six months to discover that she had married a woman and not a man, Telegraph India reported in 2010.
Here’s an example:
After suspicions arose, Khatua forced open the door as her “husband” took a bath only to discover he was a woman. She eventually called the police. NDTV reported that the fraudulent woman fled with a car and a jeep purchased with money from Khatua’s bank account.
What makes people take these unnecessary risk just for pleasure? Is this a syndrome a mental diseases or what?
Why do people want to scale mountains and hills, swim across rivers and such like when the biggest mountain to climb is often left ignored – out of ego consciousness and connect with their authentic self. That is the journey we must make as humans and when we find that all the other stuff pale in comparison with the freedom. To each his own.
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — An avalanche hit climbers on a high Himalayan peak in Nepal on Sunday, leaving at least nine dead and six others missing, officials said. Many of the climbers were French or German.
Police official Basanta Bahadur Kuwar said the bodies of a Nepalese guide and a German man were recovered and that rescue pilots had spotted seven other bodies on the slopes of Mount Manaslu in northern Nepal, the eighth highest mountain in the world.
Is Mr Mitt Romney out of touch with reality? Is he going to ignore poor people and think he could win an election in America? In case he does not know the majority of Americans are poor or teetering on the brink of poverty. America if you do not want cat to eat to eat what’s little is left you’d better get Obama in there to finish the job he started. He has a plan and Mr. Romney does not.
The Grammy fever is heating up but who cares? Celebrities are fighting to maintain our focus on them but I find that many people are into their own celebrity and everyone gets their chance to do so on Facebook.
That’s all from me for now.
Andy Whitfield “Spartacus” dead at 39 years old
Andy Whitfield, who played the title role in the hit cable series “Spartacus: Blood and Sand,” has died at age 39, according to representatives and family.
Whitfield died Sunday in Sydney, Australia, 18 months after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, manager Sam Maydew told the Associated Press.
“On a beautiful sunny Sydney spring morning, surrounded by his family, in the arms of his loving wife, our beautiful young warrior Andy Whitfield lost his 18 month battle with lymphoma cancer,” Whitfield’s wife Vashti said in a statement. “He passed peacefully surrounded by love. Thank you to all his fans whose love and support have help carry him to this point. He will be remembered as the inspiring, courageous and gentle man, father and husband he was.”
Cancer a chronic illness not a death sentence always
Even though the diagnosis of cancer sends the chill up our mortality spine and we start preparing for the end of this mortal life, it does not have to be so. According to recent reports, there are more people living with cancer today than 20 years ago. Some cancers are more difficult to arrest than others one such cancers is lung cancer. However, it does not have to be a death sentence and when you change the way you look at things the things you look at change.
The study defined a survivor as anyone who ever received a diagnosis of cancer who was alive on Jan. 1, 2007, and it did not indicate if the person was cured, undergoing treatment, afflicted with a chronic cancer-related illness, or in the process of dying at that time.
Dr. Frieden said the increase in cancer survivors was due to several factors, some of which varied by type of cancer. In some cases of breast cancer and colon cancer, for example, improved treatment and increased follow-up after treatment have helped increase survival. In others, like prostate cancer, an explosion in screening has identified many men with the disease, but the cancer is often so slow-growing that they would be unlikely to die from it. And other cancer diagnoses are simply the consequence of the country’s aging population and improved care for other diseases — in other words, people are living long enough to develop cancer.
About a million more of the survivors were women than men, partly because women live longer than men, and partly because breast and cervical cancers are often diagnosed and treated at younger ages. About 22 percent of the survivors had breast cancer, about 19 percent had prostate cancer, and about 10 percent had colorectal cancer
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/health/11cancer.html?ref=health
Queen of Soul has pancreatic cancer?
The bad news is that it is rumoured that the Queen of Soul has pancreatic cancer, the good news that the prognosis is good. Start praying for the Queen please
Girl, Get Me Started! » Aretha Franklin health update: Does Queen of Soul have cancer?
Sisters living without stomachs – incredible
I never knew people could live without a stomach but apparently there are no bounds to what doctors can achieve these days. Two sisters in England are living proof of this. One has opted to get rid of her stomach even before it developed cancer, having lost five members of her family to stomach cancer. She carries the gene that put her at high risk for the disease – read about it:
Rupert Cornwell: The incredible story of the most important woman in the history of modern medicine
Out of America: Millions of tons of immortal cells – all grown from a single tissue sample taken from 
Henrietta Lacks before her death from cancer in 1951 – are used by researchers around the world, amid a debate about ethics, race and the rights of donors and their familiesTHE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, Sunday, 7 February 2010
The life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks is commemorated in the book, written with the help of her family
She was a poor black tobacco worker, the descendant of slaves. She is buried in an unmarked grave in a clearing, just outside the little town in rural Virginia where she grew up, now all but razed from the face of the earth. Whether or not her soul lives on is a matter of religious belief. Unarguably though, her body does, and for that reason, Henrietta Lacks may be the most important woman in the history of modern medicine.
Her death in October 1951 from cervical cancer, in a public ward for “coloreds” at the then-segregated Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, was both agonising and unnoticed – as routine in its way as the excision by a surgeon a few months before of a small sample of tissue from the malignant tumour in question. The sample was taken to a lab, and called HeLa. The name, as was customary, was taken from the first two letters of the donor’s names.
Hitherto, no human cells had grown in culture. But Henrietta’s cancer cells were different. They would not stop growing. More than half a century on, HeLa remains an inexhaustible source of living cells for testing, a priceless tool for medical research around the world. They were crucial for the development of the polio vaccine, and have contributed mightily to advances in the fight against cancer, to gene mapping and the study of diseases from leukaemia to Aids. They have been sent into space and one day may help us discover that medical Holy Grail, a cure for cancer.
In all, countless trillions of cells have been produced. If they could somehow be put together, it has been estimated, they would total millions of tons – a quite inconceivable figure given that thousands of cells can fit into the full stop at the end of this sentence. Not bad, as a physical measure of immortality, for a woman who when she died at the age of 31 was hardly five feet tall.
On scientific grounds alone, the story of HeLa would be extraordinary. But in science like the rest of life, context is everything – and that context is if anything even more gripping than the story itself. Henrietta and her family have been written about before, and a dozen years ago the BBC made a documentary about her, called The Way of All Flesh. But a stunning book published last week is surely the definitive work on the subject. At one level, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a biomedical thriller. But it is far more: a case study of race and medical ethics, of the problems that plague black society, and of how a family comes to terms with its past.
Not least, it recounts Skloot’s own obsession with the Henrietta mystery, and her long effort to persuade her subject’s children, above all Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, to open up to a white writer as they struggle to come to terms with the reflected celebrity in which they so uncomfortably bask.
For humanity, HeLa has brought vast benefits; for Henrietta’s family it has generated mainly turmoil and anger. Finally the ice is broken, and Deborah agrees to co-operate. “Get ready girl,” she tells Skloot, “you’ve got no idea what you gettin’ yourself into.”
Henrietta had no idea when she died that her tissue was being used for research, still less that it had such miraculous properties; indeed, only in 1973 was she publicly confirmed as the source of the wonder-cells. That year, Henrietta’s daughter-in-law, Bobbette, also learnt the truth, from the friend of a friend, who worked in cancer research and used HeLa cells routinely. “I ordered them from a supplier,” he added casually, “just like everyone else.”
“Just like everyone else.” For Bobbette and the other Lacks, the implications of those words were terrifying. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis project, whereby black patients since 1932 had been the object of an experimental study without being told a cure – penicillin – existed for the disease, had only been shut down a year before. Once again, it seemed, poor and unwitting African-Americans were being exploited for medical research. The “night doctors” of legend, said to kidnap and murder blacks for this purpose, were stalking the land for real.
What happened to Henrietta and her cells broke no laws in 1951, and would break none today. US courts have ruled that an individual’s consent is not required for his or her discarded tissue to be used for research. For its part, Johns Hopkins (which, unlike many white-run hospitals in those days, admitted black patients) felt that a sliver of tumour was a perfectly reasonable price for free treatment.
Nor did the hospital make money from its discovery. George Gey, the hospital’s head of tissue research who discovered HeLa’s properties, sent free samples to anyone who asked. These days, patients who know they have valuable tissue may set their price before it leaves their body; if they don’t, then too bad. On the other hand, the biomedical companies that produce the stuff make money. Such is how capitalism works. Whether capitalism’s sharing of reward is fair, however, is another matter.
Astonishingly, the Lacks have never sued for the rights to HeLa, even though Henrietta’s children carry some of her DNA – and even though, years later, they were asked by Johns Hopkins to provide blood samples. They thought they were being clandestinely tested for cancer. In fact, it was to gain DNA data to tackle contamination problems caused by the prolific HeLa cells. But once again, those from whom the samples were taken were never told why.
After reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you can’t help feeling that the people who provide the original raw material are being short-changed. These days, researchers can take out patents on genes and charge a small fortune for their use in testing. In 2001, HeLa cells, for instance, were running at $167 (£107) a phial. But Henrietta’s descendants have never received a penny for her incalculable gift to science.
Life was not easy for any of her five children – least of all the youngest, Joseph, born a year before she died. A violent kid called “Crazy Joe” for his unpredictable ways, he was jailed in 1971 for 15 years for second-degree murder. In prison, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Zakariyya, but he never lost his resentment at what had happened to his mother.
“Them doctors say her cells did all this and that to help people,” he complained to Skloot. “But it didn’t do no good for her, and don’t do no good for us. The only people that can get any good from my mother’s cells is the people that got money, and whoever’s selling them cells.” Or as another of her sons put it, even more topically, “If our mother’s so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”
But ultimately, this is a story of a family coming to terms with itself, and the legacy thrust upon it. There are two especially poignant moments. In 2001, Deborah and Zakariyya finally visit the lab at Johns Hopkins to see some living cells traceable back to their mother, exactly half a century before. As they leave, even Zakariyya’s anger dissolves, as he touches the doctor on the back, murmuring just “thank you”.
A few days later, Deborah and Skloot set out to resolve one final mystery: the fate of Henrietta’s fifth child, Elsie, an epileptic who died at the age of 15 in 1955, at what was once Maryland’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. Today it is a well-kept school and community centre; then it was infamous for the overcrowding and squalor in which patients lived, and for primitive experiments conducted on their brains.
At first, the mission seemed hopeless; virtually all the hospital’s records for the 1950s had long been destroyed. A few autopsy reports however survived – and amazingly one of them was Elsie’s. Even more miraculous, attached to the page was a photograph, of Elsie being measured for height, seemingly screaming with pain, her head held in place by a pair of hands belonging to a white member of the staff. The picture was gruesome, but in its way it was closure. Just as Skloot’s book represents a kind of closure for Henrietta Lacks as well.
God Loved her More – Farrah Fawcett called home at 62
Farrah Fawcett, an actress, television star and pop-culture phenomenon whose good looks and signature leonine hairstyle influenced a generation of women and, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, bewitched a generation of men, died on Thursday in Santa Monica, California, according to Paul Bloch, her spokesman. She was 62 and had been battling cancer since late 2006.
Patrick Swayze opens up about his cancer
Patrick Swayze is not a dying man. He is a man who is fighting for his life and will not lay down and let his pancreatic cancer take over him without a fight.
Swayze open up to Barbara Walters recently on 60 Minutes. He talked his fears and anger.
Swayze said that winning for him means not giving up. He is however realistic and says he could see himself living another two more years – that would mean winning for him. He could not see himself going the 5-year survival measure because of the advanced stage of his cancer – stage IV which had already spread to his liver at the time of diagnosis in March 2008.
Swayze is undergoing aggressive chemotheraphy as well is on an experimental drug called vatalanib.Vatalanib inhibits tyrosine kinases, which are enzymes needed for cell growth, cell proliferation, and cell differentiation.
In the meantime Swayze keeps on living and doing what he is doing, commiting himself to living one day at a time and savouring the moment and trying to live in the present with optimism.
“I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer but in the light,” he said.
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