"I go in every morning and let them pour this crap into me, and feel pretty bad about it -- until I see some 17-year-old going through it all, too," says Bobby Hamilton, regarding the first two weeks of cancer treatment. While visiting his son, Bobby Hamilton, Jr., at Martinsville Speedway yesterday, he was also promoting a charity event he will participate in to benefit the American Cancer Society Relay for Life and the Victory Junction Gang Camp. On May 23, 2006, Hamilton will host a four-hour fan festival at NASCAR SpeedPark at Concord Mills.

Hamilton began treatment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for cancer of the neck. He hopes to return for the season’s final truck race in November in Homestead, Florida. In the meantime, Hamilton is turning his truck over to his son, Bobby Hamilton Jr.

When asked how his treatments were going, he said, "The first week was nothing, I just felt different. Like I'd drunk five gallons of mud. But I felt fine. So this week, me being the arrogant guy I am, I decided I'd go to the Kentucky track with my team testing, changing springs and gears, doing my merry thing. But after a while I was about ready to have them call the ambulance. It knocked all the steam out of me. This is pretty bad stuff." Hamilton is down-to-earth real, and tells it like it is -- cancer treatment is a tough track to drive -- even for a champion.

In 2004, Christine Stewart, a young woman with two small children, who did not smoke cigarettes, was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. At the time of diagnosis, Stewart was given a two percent chance of surviving a lung cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes, tailbone and brain. The good news, her physician told her, was that she still had enough time to draw up a will. During the next year of chemotherapy and radiation, her lung cancer continued to spread. Chemotherapy and radiation had failed her. One year after the initial lung cancer diagnosis, Stewart was prescribed Tarceva, a new line of targeted therapy cancer drugs, and six months later, her lung cancer had gone into remission. Stewart says she made a promise to God, that if she regained her health, she would help others affected by cancer. Practical Truisms is that promise. Practical Truisms is a book, an inspirational website for anyone who receives a cancer diagnosis with advice to make a will, and the story of Stewart's lung cancer survival.

On April 7, 2006, Stewart has a speaking engagement at the American Cancer Society Relay For Life in Naples, Florida, where she will discuss the burden of the "Positive Attitude" concept and how to develop an "Effective Attitude" instead. All in all, I think Stewart's promise to God has been a promise well-kept.