Cancer Survivors Network

Cancer is a disease that will come after you, your family, your work, and every facet of your life. It attacks health, attitude, and confidence with an array of chemicals, tests, treatments, and paperwork. And many times it comes back again.

It's not trendy but it affects enough people to be a trend. This book is about a guy who gets the bucket of cancer dropped on his head from out of nowhere.

This story is from a quirky and personal perspective of how we (family and friends too) dealt with the diagnosis, treatment, and the afterlife of Multiple Myloma.

When the doctor asked my wife if we could move up our daughter's wedding a couple of months we knew we had a problem here. We live and describe all of it, as it affects all of us. We combine treatment, our business, our lives, and the countless incidents that are a part of this.

Sometimes I feel as if I was dreaming and remembering a dream, other times it was like watching someone else's life.

Whether dealing with a chiropractor who didn't believe in medical history or with a technician who was trying for an illness conversion as I lay on the table in pain, the events show what my days were like.

The time spent preparing for and doing the stem-cell harvest to the actual transplant and recovery were some serious physical and mental anguish, but it did not stop my wife and I from fending off an insurance person or a social worker or two when "the first rule was obey all rules".

I met inspirational people in the person of my first hospital roommate, my sister, and many other friends that have cancer. Talking to them and remembering times we had were an important foothold I had living

This is a site created by an amazing woman called Michele Martineau. It's aim is to raise money to fund and support women (and men) who cannot afford the crucial Breast Cancer screening and diagnostic testing, due to lack of private medical insurance/low income etc.

Michele underwent a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy in January 2010 and was made increaingly aware of the fact that many women were simply not getting the vital help they need in being tested for Breast Cancer.

Team Courage was born to raise money to help fund such women.
Please take a look at Michele's site.She is an amazing woman that has helped me and many other women so much by giving us her support and love.

http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/05/cancer/

Points in Summary:

1. Why we need to redraw the battle plan—one that focuses on turning the treatment system into a research and learning system that can teach oncologists the best use of the weapons they already have

2. drug and biotechnology industries are lavishing increased attention on cancer (861 drugs and vaccines in clinical trials, according to a recent announcement[2]) most of the newly approved agents that squeeze through the pipeline extend the lives of patients for only a few weeks or months, often at great expense. The outcomes are never gathered. The data is never analyzed. the findings are never disseminated

3. As these patients’ cancers advance, their physicians try regimens they read about in journals or hear about from colleagues. The outcomes are never gathered. The data is never analyzed. And the findings are never disseminated.

4. an estimated 70 percent of all cancer drugs are used off-label. In other words, most prescribed chemotherapy regimens have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for that particular use. Much of the off-label use is supported by the slimmest of evidence, often just a single trial in the medical literature of limited size and duration.

5. Pediatric oncologists on the other hand, steadily refine the treatment regimens base don their success in using shared data and results in trials to the point where survival rates today are over 80 percent, up from 20 percent in the 1960s. Adult tumors can take decades to develop and are resistant to treatment. Pediatric cancers, in contrast, usually “arise from embryonic development and develop into cancers that are much more susceptible to chemotherapy and radiation

6. Focus on collecting extensive information about the 1.3 million Americans who are diagnosed and treated for cancer every year. Let nation’s physicians move toward adopting electronic medical records. This will enable oncologists to record their patients’ demographic and genetic information their diagnoses, their treatments, and, eventually, their outcomes. This information could then be analyzed retrospectively to see what works and translated into guidelines for better care if the data is in the database, you can answer that question in a few hours, or maybe even a few minutes .

7. The National Cancer Institute recently took a major step in building an information superhighway to serve a cancer learning network. The ambitious goal behind CaBIG, the Cancer Biomedical Infomatics Grid, is nothing less than turning the billions the nation spends each year on cancer care into that “learning system

She has a great way of taking on Cancer.