When Walter Melcher learned he had Stage 4 throat cancer, he knew the prognosis wasn’t good. Just four years earlier, he had lost his first wife to a 13-year battle with breast cancer. Six months later, while he was undergoing…
When Vicki Simmons learned that she had Stage 2 breast cancer last October, it confirmed what she had suspected when she first discovered the lump in her breast a week before. “That was a long day,” she recalled when she…
Kristan Becker Hoffman learned that the lump in her breast was cancer. It was a hard-hitting confirmation that would change her life and her family’s, but she was prepared to face it and seek the treatment to put her on…
If it weren’t for a visit to Memorial’s Be Aware Women’s Fair, Barbi Walter is convinced she wouldn’t be alive today. And it’s taught her to never ignore minor aches and pains because they could be warning signs of larger…
Just because you don’t have a family history of breast cancer, it doesn’t mean you’re safe. Jennifer Finley learned that when she was diagnosed a decade ago in her early 30s. Her first child, Nicholas, was just a baby when…
On April 2, Stephen Wilkin was feeling tired. It was a Monday, and after a weekend of family time and riding his motorcycle, he assumed he was coming down with a cold or the flu. He called his physician clinic,…
Kathryn Peterson first started seeing flashing lights out of the corner of her eye last December. Several weeks later, a neighbor rushed her to the hospital in her hometown of Carlinville after the lights and pain in her head intensified.…
In the late fall of 2009, Kelly Ford’s cancer journey began with an inexplicable pain in her rib. After several doctor visits, an X-ray eventually determined it was fractured, but how she injured the rib was a mystery to Kelly,…
More than 210,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year and more than 32,000 will die, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). One in every six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetimes. But…
Fighting cancer involves a multidisciplinary attack. Typically, the big three weapons a cancer patient has available to them are surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Of those three, radiation therapy is often the least understood — perhaps because of how technologically…