Even though several of Kelly Andersen’s relatives had faced prostate cancer, his own diagnosis in September 2013 came unexpectedly. He’d never experienced any symptoms. His doctor diagnosed the disease only after routine bloodwork done during his annual physical exam detected elevated PSA levels.
“I asked the doctor if it could just be a mistake, and he said he’d asked the lab to run it twice because my level was so high,” Kelly...
Six months after Emily Augenstein’s acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis, a doctor in Pittsburgh told her that her allogeneic stem cell transplant...
Over the last year and a half, Shams Peerbhai has tried just about everything to cope with peripheral neuropathy, a cancer treatment side...
A nagging pain at the end of Sam Markota’s digestive tract suddenly became unbearable during a business trip to Thailand. The then-55-year-old returned to the U.S. for his first colonoscopy. In April 2015, Sam learned that he had rectal cancer, and it had already spread to his liver and right lung.
“My first oncologist had me dead in a couple years,” Sam recalls. After undergoing chemotherapy, he and his wife sought a second opinion...
Cancer wasn’t Adel Tawfik’s first medical crisis.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Adel had two open-heart surgeries. In 2015, he had a near-fatal...
Last year, Primus Moore was among seven referees selected to officiate Oklahoma’s all-state high school football games.
“It’s inspiring...
As an executive at an oil and gas service company, Andy Moriarty often shares safety messages with his employees. Lately, these messages have...
A little over a year ago, Robbie Johnson was desperately searching for the right metastatic breast cancer treatment.
"I’d been...
It had been two years since Billa Woollam’s last mammogram, and she knew she was long overdue for one. But it was a strange sensation in her...
Jerry McLeary can recall the exact moment he just knew that his journey with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma would end happily.
During one of breast cancer survivor Margaret Looper’s early visits to MD Anderson some 15 years ago, a volunteer who escorted her to her...
Jan de Chambrier had always envisioned herself as a mother to several children. In 1990, she and her husband were on their way to fulfilling...
Dana MacFarlane may have been the one who received a leukemia diagnosis, but she’s certain every one of her family members suffered just as...
In the early 2000s, Virginia Plett watched her mother and aunt successfully undergo breast cancer treatment at MD Anderson. So when the Kansas...
Dana MacFarlane is still in awe of her sudden onset of acute myeloid leukemia in July 2017.
“I take blood tests on a routine basis...
Whether you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer or have completed one treatment and are preparing yourself for the next, the thought of radiation...