The last post in Anita Robert's blog My Journey -- where she shared her thoughts and feeling about the difficulties and surrealism of being diagnosed with cancer, going through cancer treatments and trying to survive cancer -- reads: Anita's journey ended peacefully at home on May 26, 2006. Robert's journey battling gastric cancer has come to an end. Dr. Roberts, the 49th most-cited scientist in the world and the third most-cited female scientist, chief of the Laboratory of Cell Regulation and Carcinogenesis at the National Cancer Institute, had found blogging a therapeutic tool for introspection and in communicating and connecting with others online. She had created a special page in her blog for devotions, mantras, words of faith, guidance or wisdom tradition, and invited readers to share some of their own. She was highly-regarded and much loved by the people she worked with, and most deeply loved by her family and friends. Her adult children wrote The Song of BellaDonna: a true story of hope when they learned of her cancer diagnosis. Dr. Anita Roberts was 66.
1. My mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 gastric cancer in Jan. 2006 and
passed away July 2006. Although she was Asian, she has been living
in the US for the last 50 years and only rarely had any salty or
preserved food similar to those found in the old country that is
usually associated with higher rates of gastric cancer with people of
that racial makeup. Otherwise, the majority of her diet was
vegetables, rice, some chicken, some fish, and fruits. She drank
various types of teas and maybe once or twice a month had a glass of
wine and did not smoke.
So, even if you don't fit into a high risk
group or you eat all the right things the right way, you can still get
cancer.
Has anyone ever been "cured" of gastric cancer? It was kind of depressing searching different cancer web sites for information when my mom was first diagnosed because sites like CTA would have testimonials of long-term cancer survivors from breast cancer, leukemia, melanoma, etc. , but just a blank spot for gastric cancer.
Posted at 3:21AM on Aug 24th 2006 by abg