Karen Duffy Quotes

My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

In 1962 I was diagnosed with this incurable disease.

With Alexander's cancer, I was definitely brought to my knees for the first time because of the fear factor.

Cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumor or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties.

I decided to write 'True Refuge' during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.

I have a disease, but I also have a lot of other things.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was 18 during my freshman year at UCLA. I refused to accept it - and I hid it from my coaches and teammates. But ignoring my problem didn't make it go away.

I've met a ton of new people who have colitis or Crohn's. Talking to them has been probably the most healing thing: to hear other people's attitudes on how they deal with their disease and how they stay positive.

Sickle cell was my life before hip-hop. I ain't really have no life - that was it.

I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn't talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college.

I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.

Some people say you have to fight cancer. But it was fighting me. The cure was worse than the disease, and it left me totally exhausted and depressed. I just hid myself away in my daughter-in-law's flat.

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

Once I got cancer of the tongue and throat, I realised that stress is a killer and I had to try and get stress out of my life.

Just learning that you have MS is such a devastating shock.

I'm not sure anyone goes through a cancer scare unchanged. I know it changed me in so many ways. But I was fortunate to have had a rare cancer that's slow-growing and one that allowed me to skip the chemical cocktails that would have put me into early menopause.

Having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998, and I am continually amazed by the level of support I receive from individuals across the country.

It's going to start really interfering with your quality of life, your health, if you don't adjust to life as it's happening to you.

Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I'm seemingly O.K. with it, I can't preach how to be O.K. with it. I don't think I still am O.K. with it. There's days when I'm not.

Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to.

For many years when I was younger, I let negative things that people said about me affect my life. What I've learned is that it's really important to find the right support network, focus on the positive things in your life and quiet that negative voice in your head.

I was having health issues all my life. You're just not conditioned to think of them as health issues.

I had to tell Dad, 'It will be okay and be positive; keep praying and have faith'. I have always known about cancer, but to be around someone who has it and to see what it does in such a short space of time was hard. It makes you think about your life, about what is important.

One of the things you realize when you have a health crisis in your immediate family is that life does not stop so that you can go through that experience.