cancer experience Quotes

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.

I'm an optimist, so I think everything can be worked out and fixed. But from having cancer I learned that even if you're even an optimist, sometimes you just have to face the facts that certain things are broken.

Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.

Cancer taught me to live only in the day I'm in. In the moment I'm in. Some moments, I simply ground myself by touching the desk, the table, the wall wherever I am and say, 'You're right here. Stay put in this moment.'

What I've learned from my own journey, and from my family's experience with cancer, is how important it is to stay positive and move forward. Not every day is going to be perfect; that's life. But staying positive is going to get you to the next day.

Cancer definitely rekindled my spirit. It made me realise that every human being has the capacity to overcome a huge setback.

Now I'm fighting cancer, everybody knows that. People ask me all the time about how you go through your life and how's your day, and nothing is changed for me.

When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.

Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.

It might be hard to believe, but as difficult as cancer was, in some ways it was good for me.

During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous.

People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

I was very surprised to learn how many cancer survivors are out there and how they instantly rallied to my support.

I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas.

I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled.

Cancer is really hard to go through and it's really hard to watch someone you love go through, and I know because I have been on both sides of the equation.

When I was 14, my dad came home one day and told us he had cancer. It was looking pretty bad. And I remember him saying how afraid he was that he hadn't gotten to do the things he wanted to do during his life. He had surgery and survived. And he's still alive today, thank God. But it made a big impact on me.

I suppose I didn't cry in all the cancer crap stuff because I felt I couldn't lose the battle, and part of the battle was holding myself together.

I'm still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family's experience with it. If I had been able to write 'The Pura Principle' back in those days, I'm positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false.

What cancer does is, it forces you to focus, to prioritize, and you learn what’s important.

Our bodies are critical. If I learned anything from getting really bad cancer seven years ago, it's that your body is what you've got. If you don't take care of it, you're not going to be here.

I feel so fortunate and grateful to be a survivor of breast cancer. I see it as a gift.

I'm the exact same person I was before (cancer). I'm still shallow, I still love clothes, I still want to talk fashion, I still want to gossip, so lay it on me.

I wrote the book Don't Die, My Love as I was going through radiation, so it certainly has an air of authenticity about it because I was there. I think all of my books took on kind of a deeper tone when the lady who wrote about cancer all of a sudden had cancer. I'm doing well. I went through it all and they said, 'You're fine."