Quotes & Sayings About Having Cancer

Back in my mid-20s I was told I'd never be able to have children as I wasn't having periods. Doctors tried to start up my monthly cycles, but when nothing worked, they actually offered me a hysterectomy. Without it, they said I might get ovarian cancer in the future. I chose not to have the operation, and am so glad I didn't. — Jill Scott

There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer. — John Green

Telling someone with depression to pull themselves together is about as useful as telling someone with cancer to just stop having cancer — Ricky Gervais

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was. — Jane Smiley

Ask me anything, Bailey challenged.
What are you scared of? The question got out of Tibby's mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. I'm afriad of time, she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time, she clarified. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that eerybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.
Tibby looked at her in disbelief. She was struck by this new side of Bailey, this philosophical-beyond-her-years Bailey. Did cancer make you wise? Did those chemicals and X rays supercharge her twelve-year-old brain? — Ann Brashares

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people. — John Green

There's a current notion that you should "take charge of your disease." No thanks. I'm busy. I've got cancer. I'm willing to face having cancer. I'm not willing to face having cancer with homework. I promised Dr. Pipas and Dr. Zaki that I wouldn't show up with sheaves of printouts from the Internet containing everything on Wikipedia on malignancies. They each laughed with detectable notes of relief. Although I suspect my wife has made her way into the health blog ether. Fish oil pills, raw kelp, and other untoward substances started showing up on dinner plates after I was diagnosed. — P. J. O'Rourke

In my late 30s, I flirted with the idea of having a child without necessarily being in a steady relationship. But I've never had a strong maternal urge, and then I got cancer of the womb - luckily caught at an early stage - so that put paid to that. — Kiki Dee

My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill. — David Frum

We aspire to omniscience, but should we ever actually become omniscient what would be the point in continuing to exist? The game would be over and done. No mystery would be left to lend our lives a mystique, and without this mystique everything we do would be reduced to numbers we could look up in a computer file and have no need to puzzle over. We would be victorious . . . and bored to death. Everything having to do with humanity and nonhumanity would hit a wall and come to a stop. We seem to have set out on an expedition whose success would be our ruin. The only way out, perhaps, would be to fashion creatures less knowing than ourselves and exist through them. What humiliation, what pathos that we should ever end up as gods. Is there nothing that can bring us into reconciliation with the cancer of existence? — Thomas Ligotti

When they [Democrats] running all these ads that are characterizing [Mitt] Romney as a rich, insensitive, out of touch, aloof nerd who loved having his dog on the roof of the station wagon, who didn't care when the wife of an employee dies with cancer. — Rush Limbaugh

Having cancer is a lonely experience. It is the one time in your life that you cannot ask those closest to you, 'What should I do?' It's too heavy a burden to place on another person. This is your life, your decision, and cancer kills. — Suzanne Somers

Hope is as essential to your life as air and water. You need hope to cope. Dr. Bernie Siegel found he could predict which of his cancer patients would go into remission by asking, "Do you want to live to be one hundred?" Those with a deep sense of life purpose answered yes and were the ones most likely to survive. Hope comes from having a purpose. — Rick Warren

One of my patients told me that when she tried to tell her story people often interrupted her to tell her that they once had something just like that happen to them. Subtly her pain became a story about themselves. Eventually she stopped talking to most people. It was just too lonely. We connect through listening. When we interrupt what someone is saying to let them know that we understand, we move the focus of attention to ourselves. When we listen, they know we care. Many people with cancer talk about the relief of having someone just listen. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Having cancer is one thing; looking like you have cancer is another thing. It's a disease that already takes so much. — Amy Robach

Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.
Yet, if you were poor and wretched, you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money.
And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

In my mid-twenties, I said to myself: 'I can't perform anymore!' I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't perform for a while, then ended up doing a one-woman show about Gilda Radner having cancer. It was called 'Gilda Defying Gravity,' and I did it on the Lower East Side. It was great; people really came out and supported me. — Spencer Kayden

Callahan found that the common first reaction to news of cancer, strokes, heart attacks, or the failure of some major organ was one of betrayal. The patient was astounded to find that such a close (and, up to now at least, fully understood) friend as one's own body could be so sluggard as to lie down on the job. The reaction which followed close on the heels of the first was the thought that a friend who would let one down so cruelly was not worth having. The conclusion that followed these reactions was that it didn't matter if this friend was worth having or not. One could not refuse to speak to one's traitorous body, or get up a petition against it, or pretend that one was not at home when it called. The final thought in this hospital-bed train of reasoning was the hideous possibility that one's body might not be a friend at all, but an enemy implacably dedicated to destroying the superior force that had used it and abused it ever since the disease of reason set in. — Stephen King

For many years now I have listened to the stories of people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as their counselor. From them I have learned how to enjoy the minute particulars of life once again, the grace of a hot cup of coffee, the presence of a friend, the blessing of having a new cake of soap or an hour without pain. Such humble experience is the stuff that many of the very best stories are made of. If we think we have no stories it is because we have not paid enough attention to our lives. Most of us live lives that are far richer and more meaningful than we appreciate. — Rachel Naomi Remen

If random violence doesn't get you, cancer will. If cancer doesn't, global warming will. If global warming doesn't, bullet ants will. Or botflies. Or lightning. Or tsunamis. Or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Or Fijian headhunters. Or just normal everyday activities like drinking water, eating an orange, breathing the air, or having sex with a goat. Yes, — Cary McNeal

And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea. — James Agee

Should I talk about [having breast cancer]? Because how many things could I have? You know black, lesbian - I'm like, I can't be the poster child for everything. At least with the LGBT issues we get a parade and a float and it's a party. — Wanda Sykes

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.' — Abraham Verghese

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun, — Molly Ivins

Too many people are overly respectful, braying, 'You're so brave' and Irv fell smack into that trap. After all what's so courageous about having cancer? Once we have it, what choice do we have? But the worst thing of all - and thank God Irv doesn't do this, at least not yet - is all this nonsensical talk about a patient's courageous struggle with cancer that all too often ends in defeat. How many obituaries do you see stating that so-and-so lost their courageous battle with cancer? I hate that! I absolutely hate it! If someone put that in my obituary, I'd come back and kill him! — Irvin D. Yalom

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. — Hoda Kotb

I never thought of having cancer as something that was unfair. I just braced myself and tried to get through it. — Sam Taylor-Wood

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

Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer. — Chris Hayes

In a sense, having cancer takes you by the shoulders and shakes you. — Elizabeth Edwards

Mother says she doesn't need the medication anymore, that the only cure for cancer is having a daughter who won't cut her hair and wears dresses too high above the knee even on a Sunday, because how knows what tackiness I'd do to myself if she died. — Kathryn Stockett

Lance Armstrong showed up, and I started talking to him; I saw all these people with cancer who followed him to Paris for the Tour de France, and I saw the difference he was making in their lives. That put it together for me ... having it be not so much about me, but [my being] a vehicle for it. — Michael J. Fox

I used to cry to the stars in the sky and begged them to have mercy on me cause I longed for the moment when the amount of pain I felt would be unbearable and I would simply go numb. Numb. The very taste of that word was a sweet symphony to me. A relief. An alleviation in my unendurable existence. A cure. I ached because of more reasons than I could contain. My mother's cancer, my unrequited love, my worn body. The absence of my dignity and innocence. The utter feeling of abandonment. My yearning for love and family. My beloved father who left me. My freakiness and lack of belonging somewhere. My bisexuality and faith deprivation. My poverty, being insolvent most of my life, having no money to my name since forever. My shack of a house, cold and loathed from the very first days. My sorrow and grief caused by my weaknesses and deficiencies... — Magdalena Ganowska

Crazy to think that we're having surgery, we're trying to excise cancer, we don't know where the cancer is. We're trying to preserve nerves; we can't see where they are. — Nguyen Quyen

If you are having the experience of anxiety, your body is making adrenaline and cortisone, if you are having the experience of tranquility, your body starts making valium, if you are having the experience of exhilaration and joy, your body makes interleukins and interferons which are powerful anti-cancer drugs. So, your body is constantly converting your experiences into molecules. — Deepak Chopra

Not having hair makes me feel like a cancer patient. — Amanda Bynes

Nelson-Rees had since been hired by the National Cancer Institute to help stop the contamination problem. He would become known as a vigilante who published "HeLa Hit Lists" in Science, listing any contaminated lines he found, along with the names of researchers who'd given him the cells. He didn't warn researchers when he found that their cells had been contaminated with HeLa; he just published their names, the equivalent of having a scarlet H pasted on your lab door. — Rebecca Skloot

I have been tested in many ways, personally, I have beaten breast cancer, I buried a child to addiction. Professionally, you cannot go from being a secretary of nine-person real estate firm to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world without having been tested over and over and over. — Carly Fiorina

Agustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed. — John Green

You can say what you want about all the guns in the country [the USA], all the drugs, all the crime, but we all know 400,000 people a year die of cigarette-related deaths. How many people died of drugs, guns, automobile accidents? You add them all together it doesn't come anywhere near that. Yet they let me smoke and get cancer, and they put me in jail for having drugs. What's going on? The government don't care. It's all about money and job security. — Sonny Barger

Having had cancer, one important thing to know is you're still the same person at the end. You're stripped down to near zero. But most people come out the other end feeling more like themselves than ever before. — Kylie Minogue

I think cancer is a hard battle to fight alone or with another person at your side, but I will say having someone to pick you up when you fall, stand by your side through every appointment and delivery of bad news, is priceless. — Jenna Morasca

I think the purpose of government is for a population to accomplish its mutually agreed-upon goals without every citizen having to accomplish those goals for him- or herself. Some examples: we have a police force so we don't need to have vigilante mobs. We have a post office so we don't need to deliver our own mail across the entire nation. We have a fire department so we don't have to put out our own fires.
In return for the services we agree on, we pay a fee.
We just don't all agree on what the services and what the fees should be.
I personally think it's sad we don't all agree on single-payer health care. We agree on paying taxes to save a house from fire but not a body from cancer? Why do we care more about our property than about ourselves? — Robert Peate

need to talk about my mother," one of the women said. Her name was Susan. She was blond, very pretty, a stockbroker. Her mother was dying of cancer. "I have this horrible feeling of never having even known her. All my life, my father . . . was like a god to me. I worshipped him. I couldn't understand why he ever married my mother. He was so special and she's just . . . I always thought she was just this ordinary, everyday . . . I had no sense of her dignity, her nobility, really. She raised five kids and kept a house and gave him the support he needed and totally subjugated herself to him, to all of us, really, to our needs, and now when I think . . . She's even — Judith Rossner

Having cancer empowered me to take more risks. I knew beating cancer was going to shape me, but it wasn't going to be all of me. — Hoda Kotb

Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer. — Alan Hirsch

I have no regrets. I had an amazing surrogate who carried my son for me. I am so grateful to her. I can even say I am grateful for having cancer. I was always meant to be a mom, but if I didn't have cancer, I never would have had Zev. I would have had a kid, but not Zev, and I want Zev - tantrums and all. — Marissa Jaret Winokur

Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me.' Why not me? Why does tragedy always have to hit someone else? — Eric Davis

You know that part in An Imperial Affliction when Anna's walking across the football field to go to PE or whatever and she falls and goes face first into the grass and that's when she knows that the cancer is back and in her nervous system and she can't get up and her face is like an inch from the football -field grass and she's just stuck there looking at this grass up close, noticing the way the light hits it and ... I don't remember the line but it's something like Anna having the Whitmanesque revelation that the definition of humannness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever. You know that part? — John Green

What if I hadn't worked so hard? What if ... I had actually used ... my position to be a role model for balance? Had I done so intentionally, who's to say that, besides having more time with my family, I wouldn't also have been even more focused at work? More creative? More productive? It took inoperable late stage brain cancer to get me to examine things from this angle. - Eugene O'Kelly, former CEO, KPMG — Brigid Schulte

Having thyroid cancer in 2009 really didn't change my life at all. I wish I could say that I had this epiphany. But I knew I was lucky before that, so it's not like I suddenly realised how lucky I am. — Clare Balding

Preventative medicine has to be the direction we go in. For example, if colon cancer is detected early - because a person knew he had a genetic risk and was having frequent exams - the surgery is relatively inexpensive and average survival is far greater than 10 years. — Craig Venter

Be glad you don't have a vagina," my friend, who does have a vagina, told me. "You have to have a special doctor. You have to have these awful exams where you basically get naked and then remove your dignity. And then the various parts down there can get cancer and have to get cut out. I'm telling you, having a vagina is like having a pet. Like a dog that's always chasing cars."
When she described it this way, it did seem a blessing that I was born without a vagina. I mean, I can't even handle having a heart. — Augusten Burroughs

Having cancer does make you try to be better at everything you do and enjoy every moment. It changes you forever. But it can be a positive change. — Jaclyn Smith

An overweight officer, having delivered a batch of children to the home, started telling one of the guards about his heart problem. "You think you want to be a cop, but you don't, because it kills you," said the officer, mopping his brow. Then he told of another officer with a lung problem, and one who had cancer, and of others who were stress-sick, and of how none of them earned enough to afford decent doctors. Abdul hadn't previously thought of policemen as people with hearts and lungs who worried about money or their health. The world seemed replete with people as bad off as himself, and this made him feel less alone. — Katherine Boo

I'm happy to tell you that having been through surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, breast cancer is officially behind me. I feel absolutely great and I am raring to go. — Carly Fiorina

I know that societies often have killed people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine. — Malcom X Alex Haley

Just when I think you've hit bottom you continue to amaze me," Kyle said. "Or, does this get worse? Nothing would surprise me after this. Are you sleeping with a married man whose wife is dying of cancer?"
Elroy didn't think he'd done anything wrong. "I know nothing about his wife, or his husband for that matter. I don't ask and I'm not out to break up his home. Lighten up, man. Everybody does it. It's not like I'm going to freaking marry this dude. I'm only having a little fun with him. You wanna come with me? We'll have a three-way. You should see the way this guy moves. It will blow your mind."
With that remark Kyle shoved his hands into his pockets and walked faster. "No, thank you. That's not something I'm interested in doing. Meeting nice, decent people is the only thing that blows my mind. I just hope you're using condoms, you goddman asshole. — Ryan Field

Cancer changes your life, often for the better. You learn what's important, you learn to prioritize, and you learn not to waste your time. You tell people you love them. My friend Gilda Radner used to say, 'If it wasn't for the downside, having cancer would be the best thing and everyone would want it.' That's true. If it wasn't for the downside. — Gilda Radner

Even if the body's inflammatory response is a necessary part of its physiology to heal wounds, fight infection, and rebuild the muscles. However, too much inflammation leads to a number of conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, atherosclerosis, arthritis, autonomous disorders, cancer, chronic pain, eczema, premature aging, and yeast infection. Sugar is an inflammatory food and having too much sugar in the body exposes it to a continuously inflamed state. Sugar detox helps prevent the foretasted conditions which put sugar addicts at a higher risk of contracting these conditions. — Samantha Michaels

Thanks to feminism, women can now acquire status in two ways: through marriage or their own achievements. Cure cancer or marry the man who does, either way society will applaud. Unless he marries into the British royal family, it doesn't work that way for men. Wives shed no glory on their husbands. Having tea with Nancy Reagan is an honor; having tea with Denis Thatcher is a joke. — Katha Pollitt

I think having the cancer allowed me to be able to freely talk about my faith. — Paul Henderson

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. — Atul Gawande

It's often pretty hard to speak to others about my cancer. I have a number of pet peeves. Many folks are overly solicitous. They can't do enough for you. There's that Kaiser nurse who keeps asking "Isn't there someone who can drive you here?" And some people are too prying. I think they are voyeuristic and attempt to satisfy their morbid curiosity about having cancer. I don't like that and have sometimes wanted to say, "Go get your own damn fatal illness. — Irvin D. Yalom

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been. — Anthony Marra