Although these are important issues year-round, November is the month dedicated to raising awareness about lung cancer, family caregivers, hospice care and the very important marrow donor program.

Lung Cancer Awareness Month is a national campaign to raise awareness about lung cancer. In addition to facts and resources, the Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA), a patient support and advocacy organization, hosts the Faces of Lung Cancer Campaign on their website featuring photos of those lives that have been touched by lung cancer.

According to facts presented by LCA, lung cancer will kill more people this year than breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer, kidney cancer and melanoma combined. Lung cancer will kill three times as many men as prostate cancer this year. Lung cancer will kill nearly twice as many women as breast cancer this year. Although smokers are diagnosed with lung cancer, not all lung cancer patients smoked before being diagnosed. Visit LCA for ways to get involved in the month-long campaign to bring attention to lung cancer.

To read our posts about lung cancer, visit Lung Cancer.

National Family Caregivers Month is a way to say thank you, show our personal support and create community support, and help educate the public about the issues and realities caregivers face each day they lovingly care for a family member or friend in need of care.

To caregivers, Suzanne Mintz says, "If we believe in ourselves, protect our health, reach out for help, and speak up for our rights we can each improve our day-to-day lives, but also together we can change our healthcare system and our society to make it more responsive to the needs of families dealing with chronic illnesses and disabilities." The National Family Caregivers Association (NFCA) is an organization that supports, empowers, educates, and speaks up for the more than 50 million Americans who are caregivers.

To read our posts about caregivers, visit Cancer Caregivers.

National Hospice Month is a campaign to raise awareness of hospice care in honoring the terminally ill and their family members during a difficult time and creating the most comfortable home or home-like environment possible. The first hospice began in 1974 with the Connecticut Hospice providing palliative care using the combined knowledge and skill of a team of physicians, nurses, medical social workers, therapists, counselors, home care aides and volunteers. To learn more about hospice care, visit the National Association for Home Care and Hospice.

National Marrow Awareness Month brings public attention for the more than 50,000 Americans each year who are diagnosed with leukemia and other blood diseases and are in need of a bone marrow or blood stem cell transplant in order to survive. To learn more about this program, and how you might be able to help, visit the National Marrow Donor Program.

The doctor was a friend. When he learned I had been diagnosed with cancer, he leaned towards me and said, "Stay close to nature."

Connecting to the cycles and seasons of nature; smelling the rich earth held in the hand; tasting time that does not go too fast or too slow but is eternally measured in the spaces of now; this is where the convergence of the physical and spiritual worlds meet most directly and I find myself standing in the middle with an awareness that any separation was only a misunderstanding on my part. To remember life, sometimes you need to find your way back to its most natural forms.

It is good to express a matter in two ways simultaneously so as to give it both a right foot and a left. Truth can stand on one leg, to be sure; but with two it can walk. -- Nietzsche

Integrated medicine combines mainstream western medical practices with complementary and alternative therapies -- two ways simultaneously -- giving medical treatments both a right foot and a left, in providing optimal outcomes. Seek a second opinion, and a third opinion, and a fourth opinion, if necessary, until you are comfortable that the chosen course of treatment feels right for you -- and is one you can believe in completely.

The life I touch for good will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. -- Frederick Buechner

I cannot name them by name or hold the image of their faces in my mind, because I do not know their names and I have not seen their faces. I do carry each of them in my grateful heart for every morning that I wake again. The research renegades and rebels of convention, the pioneers of radical thought and original perspective exploring unmapped microscopic territories, and the altruistic money movers and policy makers. Most of all, I am indebted in ways I may never be able to repay, to the women who volunteered for clinical trials and experimental treatments that may or may not have helped them live longer, but led to the current treatments that help me to live longer.

The number of lives who have touched my life are counted the same as the number of stars in the clear night sky, and I, in turn, now do what I can to touch the lives of others, others that will never know me by name or hold the image of my face in their mind, as part of the continuum and connection of the healing and the healed.