If there were such a thing as a prostate cancer “poster patient” it would be Denny Simonavice. His experience reflects why men need to: Simonavice was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2015 when a six-month follow-up blood test to recheck his prostate specific antigen (PSA) showed his previously elevated PSA had continued to rise. Additional…
Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton said the only disability in life is a bad attitude. If you think 19-year-old Jake Olson has a disability because he is blind, then you have the wrong attitude. Olson lost his sight to cancer as a child. But that hasn’t stopped him from fulfilling his dream of playing college…
My story starts five years ago. I needed to lose some weight and get in shape. I went to Clarksville Schwinn and bought my first road bike. On one of my trips there, I noticed a flier advertising the Bike to Beat Cancer. The name of the ride quickly had my attention. I asked some…
Cancer should only occur in old people — old people we don’t know. It was awful, as little kids, when our grandmom died of lung cancer. That was our frame of reference for the injustice of this disease until Feb. 15, 2016, when our little brother, Owen, died of cancer. He was 16. Owen was…
Cancer is no joke, yet designer Emily McDowell found that humor can be a potent source of encouragement and courage for those touched by the disease. In 2015, McDowell, a cancer survivor, created a series of sassy greeting cards that soon became a social media sensation. By focusing on “real cancer truths,” McDowell sought to…
We’ve known for some time that obesity is a significant risk factor for several types of cancer. Credible published research has linked increased rates of breast, colorectal, esophageal (throat), kidney and uterine cancers to being significantly overweight — as measured by body mass index (BMI). Now, a team from the International Agency for Research on…
The debate about the effectiveness of testing for prostate cancer still lingers, leaving prevention-minded guys puzzled about the facts. And understandably so, according to Matthew J. Fargen, M.D., Norton Community Medical Associates – Fincastle: “It’s a very complicated subject.” But because it is the most common cancer in men (after skin cancer), screening for it…
It was the Sunday afternoon before orientation on my first day of work at Norton Healthcare when my grandmother told me the story of “the man in the red coat”: The Rev. John Norton. She described how more than 100 years ago The Rev. Norton was known in our community as the Good Samaritan because…
Hair loss is a common side effect of chemotherapy and typically associated with significant distress and concern. This often-dreaded, emotionally charged outcome is no longer a forgone conclusion thanks to new system called DigniCap, which uses advanced technology and a patented tight-fitting cap to cool the patient’s scalp. Norton Cancer Institute is the first cancer…
On April 1, 2013, we sat in an ear-nose-throat doctor’s office thinking that Jeff had pulled a muscle in his neck from playing basketball with our son. The doctor had told us the previous Friday that he was sure that is what Jeff had done. When he came in that morning and told us that…
I have followed Vice President Joseph Biden’s task to establish a “cancer moonshot” with equal parts excitement and skepticism. If you look at this all-out effort to accelerate cancer research in the context of history, you will find we had a similar call to arms in 1971 when President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer…
After months of trying to figure out what the lump in my clavicle was, my ear-nose-throat doctor looked at me and said, “I think it’s cancer and I want it out. If I’m wrong, I’ll take you out to dinner wherever you want to go and you can punch me in the face at the…