OK, women of the world. Grab some paper and a pen and jot down this list of seven check-ups every woman needs. Don't just write them down, though. Make sure you take action on each and every one. They might just save your life.

1. Start with your weight, height, and BMI (body mass index). The scores you get on these simple tests are important because many conditions and diseases are associated with being overweight or underweight.

2. Check your blood pressure, and find out where you stand because hypertension is a disease with no symptoms. High blood pressure puts you at risk for cardiovascular disease -- but there are very effective treatments for this condition.

The Utah Jazz's Derek Fisher finds himself in a whole new ballgame lately as he helps his 10-month-old daughter, Tatum, fight for her life.

Tatum was diagnosed last week with retinoblastoma, a cancerous tumor in her left eye. Fisher, who was excused from his team to begin dealing with his daughter's illness, flew his family -- his wife Candace, Tatum, and Tatum's twin brother Drew -- to New York on Monday to see a specialist.

Fisher and his wife must decide on a course of treatment for their daughter. Their options are removal of the eye or a combination of surgery and chemotherapy. Their most pressing goal is to save Tatum's life. They also want to save her eye. And they think in her case, she should be able to keep her eye.

We're not even 11 days into Skin Cancer Awareness Month, and already my awareness about the disease has been raised several times.

Today, I learned that measuring the amount of melanin in a strand of hair can predict a person's risk for melanoma. It's all detailed in the May 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. And the study leading to this new conclusion -- that the amount of melanin in hair indicates an individual's skin type -- is quite interesting.

Think about this:

Researchers involved in a large skin cancer trial measured 2,3,5-pyrroletricarboxylic acid (PTCA) levels of 98 subjects with melanoma and 98 subjects without melanoma. They found the subjects with a PTCA concentration below 85ng/mg had more than four times the risk of developing melanoma.

Today I offer you not so much a Thought for the Day but a Question for the Day. Before I ask my pressing question, though, I want you to consider this story.

Diagnosed with a rare malignant melanoma on her retina in 2001, Ann Guthrie, a South Carolina wife and mother of two grown sons, endured radiation and chemotherapy. The treatments shrunk Guthrie's tumor, but another mass appeared two years later, forcing the removal of her right eye.

At about the same time Guthrie lost her eye, cancer was discovered in her lungs. It was inoperable. Then cancer landed in her brain. And now, without any approved treatment avenues, Guthrie is out of options.

Like many people with terminal illnesses, this woman is willing to try just about anything -- a clinical trial, experimental drugs, risky treatments -- to extend her life. If she's going to die anyway, why not? She just might live longer. And if she doesn't, she could at least help advance science by offering herself up as a sort of guinea pig.

While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed changes that would make it easier for patients to access options like these, it's just not that simple right now.

There are ethical issues -- like weighing the needs of people who think anything is better than death against the need of society to prove drugs and treatments work safely. The only way to ensure a sort of balance is through clinical trials -- and letting anyone participate in clinical trials, for example, would make the results harder to interpret.

And there are medical and legal risks. What if terminally ill patients end up in worse shape after a treatment with an experimental drug, for example? What if the FDA or a physician is considered responsible for adverse drug reactions?

Denying terminal patients their last bits of hope is difficult. "It's a hard discussion to have with a patient and his family," says one doctor. "There's a lot of tears. We all would love to be able to get them access to some form of therapy."

And now for my question:

What do you think about terminally ill cancer patients and their access to anything that might extend -- or save -- their lives?

It's already been established that type 2 diabetes increases the risk of pancreatic cancer. And now, research indicates there is also a link between type 1 diabetes and this type of cancer.

The risk is relatively small -- but still, those with type 1 diabetes have a likelihood of developing pancreatic cancer that is twice as high as in non-diabetics. This is similar to the risk those with type 2 diabetes face.

There are many theories about the link between diabetes and pancreatic cancer, and this research -- published in the British Journal of Cancer -- helps narrow the scope of the theories.

For example, one researcher says the study rules out "a cancer-inducing role of the insulin-producing beta-cells in the pancreas, because in type 1 diabetes these cells have largely or entirely been destroyed."

Experts say people with diabetes should focus their attention on the most common complications of diabetes such as heart disease, eye disease, and kidney disease and not on the very small risk of cancer. In the whole scheme of things, pancreatic cancer is a rare disease -- and even twice the risk is not very significant.

Patients diagnosed with retinoblastoma have a greater chance than the general public of developing soft-tissue sarcomas over their lifetime, says an article recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Retinoblastoma is a rare cancer that originates in the eye. Treatment for retinoblastoma often includes radiation therapy and may also include chemotherapy and surgical removal of the eye. There has been some concern that radiation therapy increases the risk of developing cancer in tissues within the radiation field.

The National Cancer Institute recently conducted a study to evaluate potential associates between patients diagnosed with retinoblastoma and the rate of soft-tissue sarcomas following treatment.

The study included 963 patients treated and diagnosed with hereditary retinoblastoma from 1914-1984. Data on these patients regarding the rates of soft-tissues sarcomas were compared to the general population.

The researchers concluded that patients diagnosed with hereditary retinoblastoma appear to have a significantly increased risk of developing soft-tissue sarcomas. This risk was increased in these patients whether or not they received radiation therapy and remained increased outside the field of radiation therapy; this indicates a potential genetic susceptibility for soft tissue sarcomas among patients with hereditary retinoblastoma.

Researchers have pioneered the first technique to biopsy tissue from the living eye in order to predict what tumors possess a high chance of spreading to other parts of the body.

If the eye cancer metastasizes the patient will usually not survive the disease. Ocular melanoma attacks the pigment cells in the retina. Earlier studies discovered that patients who are missing one copy of chromosome 3 in their tumor tissue are more likely to have highly aggressive cancers.

This new procedure could offer huge medical and psychological benefits to the patients. Dr. Tara Young, assistant professor of ophthalmology at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute and a Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher, said "Identifying patients at high risk for metastasis is an important first step toward reducing the death rate of this cancer, which kills nearly half of its patients."

The technique of fine needle aspiration for collecting cancer cells from the living eye has been the standard of care at the Jules Stein Eye Institute since 2004, but adopted by only a handful of other ophthalmic centers in the nation.

Ocular melanoma is the most common eye cancer to strike adults. Some 2,000 cases are newly diagnosed every year in the United States and Canada.

Patients want to know about their prognosis. The patients that have a low chance of metastasis can breathe a sigh of relief and the high risk group can plan arrangements for their family and finances. The high risk group might also want to have more aggressive treatment and join a clinical trial to find better treatments to treat metastatic eye cancer.

An issue of great debate for quite some time, scientists seem to have finally put an end to the cell phone/cancer connection argument. According to a study in the December issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, scientists from the Danish Institute of Cancer Epidemiology have determined that short and long-term cell phone use is not associated with the increased risk of cancer.'

The question of cell phones' safety -- especially as it was supposedly related to its causing certain types of cancer -- is one that consumers and scientists have been hoping to have answered for quite some time. Because cell phones emit electromagnetic fields that can penetrate into the human brain, it's been speculated that this could potentially cause tumors in the head or neck. However, based on this new information, it appears as though this is not the case.

Studying just over 420,000 cell phone users who first starting using their "celly" between the years 1982 and 1995, the researchers tracked these individuals' health until 2002. The researchers did not find any connection between short or long-term cell phone use and brain tumors, eye tumors, salivary gland tumors, or leukemia.

So, with that cell phone issue now taken care of, I suppose that all that remains is dealing with the whole talking-and-driving thing. Oh yeah, and also doing my best to stop picturing a piece of danish dressed in a lab coat.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have demonstrated a new locally applied treatment for the eye cancer retinoblastoma. The new treatment, tested on mice, reduced the size of the tumor and also did not cause the side effects common with chemotherapy.

This targeted therapy uses a customized drug to disable a specific molecule inside a growing cancer cell. It is delivered locally to the site of the disease, rather than using systematic treatment. Dr. Dyer, Ph. D., associate member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology said "The findings suggest that this treatment not only could offer children with retinoblastoma more effective and less toxic treatment, it could also increase the chance that their vision can be preserved by eliminating the tumor and preventing its spread from the eye to the rest of the body".

Retinoblastoma occurs in about 5,000 young children worldwide each year, arising from the immature retina, which is the part of the eye responsible for detecting light and color. A report on this work appears in the November 2nd issue of the journal Nature.

Some mechanism has been at work in my body for the past month, some sort of filter that has somehow warded off the crippling panic that typically overcomes me during health scares. It's the panic that allows me to turn a simple cough into a symptom of lung cancer, a stomach pain into a sign of ovarian cancer. It's the curse of surviving cancer, I guess -- the continual worry that the disease is coming back, that it is going to strike someone dear to me.

Yet cancer never entered my mind when my husband and I began noticing our three-year-old Danny's strange eye movements, the strikingly odd manner in which one eye rolls upward when he gazes toward the ceiling -- this is normal -- while the other only crosses -- this is not normal. Surprisingly, I was not overly worried about this and was sure it was something that with glasses or eye exercises could be fixed. Never did I fear cancer.

We started with our pediatrician who quickly knew this issue was out of his league. I was calm. He moved us on to a pediatric eye specialist who was stumped by these eye movements that are typically congenital and occur much earlier in life. If not congenital, it must be something acquired, this doctor told us. He looked around a bit at Danny's eyes, dilated his pupils, and tested his vision. He determined his eyesight is perfect. And his gaze is a complete mystery. He ordered an MRI.

Still I was okay -- until my husband shared one evening with me that he was worried about a tumor. Why I hadn't yet obsessed about this is its own mystery, for which I am thankful. It allowed me to function for a short time independent of fear and anxiety and only a short time ago did I let panic seep into my consciousness.

When I scheduled the MRI for Danny and was told it was an urgent case that must be scheduled quickly, my stomach sank. When the doctor who would read the MRI met with us this morning to talk about this diagnostic procedure, he shared that a mass is what they would be looking for. I'm not sure how for all these weeks I missed this opportunity to get all worked up. But I did. And I got to act like a normal worried mother, not an over-the-top this must be cancer obsessed mother. It felt good.

And it felt good when the doctor read the MRI right in front of us this morning, sharing that there is no mass. He was not able to share what is causing this mystery eye condition that still must be investigated, but he assured us it's nothing serious, nothing life-threatening, nothing like cancer.

Perhaps the fact that my handful of recent health scares have not resulted in malignancies is allowing me to cool my guns a bit, to relax, to realize that not everything comes with a worst-case-scenario result. So maybe -- just maybe -- I am approaching some normalcy in my life, two years after my own worst-case-scenario sent me on the most terrifying ride of my life.

Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a ban on over-the-counter (OTC) sales of skin-lightening products containing hydroquinone. Hydroquinone is found in skin bleaching products used primarily for lightening age spots, skin discoloration from years of excess tanning or dark under-eye circles. Research has indicated a possible link to increased cancers.

In the US, there are over 65 companies selling more than 200 skin-bleaching products that contain hydroquinone. Hydroquinone has been banned in Japan, the European Union and Australia. The FDA now wants all OTC and prescription skin-lightening products containing hydroquinone to be classified as new drugs and companies making the skin-bleaching products would need to seek FDA approval to sell them. Likely, the products would stop being available as an OTC product. The proposed ban means that the FDA will take public comments until the end of this year before making any final action.

Less than one year ago, Rep. John P. "Jack" Murtha, D-Pa., came crashing onto the national scene with his opinion that the U.S. military could accomplish nothing more in Iraq and should be pulled out of the war zone. It was a harsh opinion -- and one his Democratic partners thought might hurt their party at a time when they were trying to gain control of Congress. The fact that the Democrats had been seen as weak on national security didn't help. And then a funny thing happened.

Murtha, 74 -- a decorated Marine and the first combat veteran of the Vietnam War elected to the House of Representatives -- became one of the most popular Democrats around, despite or maybe because of his passionate beliefs. Once a behind-the-scenes kind of man, he is now in the public eye. He's out raising money for Democrats in many states. He's attending fundraising events with Al Gore and others. And he's gathering allies at every turn. And while he still faces opposition, he believes that he must make public what he stands for. And so he does. And because of his recent uncharacteristic charismatic presence, details about this once-to-himself man are emerging. Details like these: A local airport is named for him. An institute for the study of neuroscience and pain is named for him. And a breast cancer center bears the name of his wife, Joyce.

The Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center at Windber Medical Center opened its doors in February 2002. Located in Windber, Pennsylvania, this center began as a collaboration between Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Windber Medical Center and ever since its beginning has offered full diagnostic services for breast health and disease in one convenient location.

Murtha is surely raising awareness with his opinion about the military and national security and war. And even breast cancer gets a little press out of the whole frenzy surrounding this man and his efforts. Which reminds me that somehow, breast cancer seems to touch the lives of just about everyone is some way.

When I received my treatments for breast cancer I was first given Adriamycin and Cytoxan. Following that I received Taxotere for 4 cycles every three weeks. That was in 2002. Things have changed somewhat now that Taxotere is sometimes given in dose dense quantities (every week for 12 weeks in some cases). I'm not sure if this regimen causes fewer side effects from the Taxotere. I have heard that it does.

I had a side effect called oral thrush resulting from Taxotere. When our immune systems are compromised we can develop oral thrush. I know others do suffer with thrush and are sometimes given a mouthwash to ease the discomfort. My oncologist prescribed Diflucan for 7 days straight after I would receive Taxotere treatments. This worked well to prevent and help with the mouth thrush. I would suggest asking your doctor about Diflucan if the mouthwash or other remedies do not work.

Another tip for Taxotere side effects is to get tissues with lotion in them. I had a terrible time with eye tearing. It is like when you get a sore nose from a cold. The tissues just made my eyes very red from rubbing them. The tissues with lotion in them helped tremendously with the irritation.

My last tip, although odd, would be not to drive when wearing fake eyelashes after a Taxotere treatment!! My eyes started to tear and the lash glue leaked into my eyes. I didn't crash or anything but I had to pull over because the glue formed a white film and I couldn't see! I'm glad a cop didn't pull over to see what was going on. I had black mascara running down my face and two fake eyelashes stuck where they weren't supposed to be. I do remember sitting in the car laughing about how ridiculous I looked.

Cancer treatment side effects (example: yeast infection in mouth!), CAN be ridiculous. Sharing tips among survivors however is smart.

I wish I could reverse the damage I've already done to my skin after too much time spent in the scorching sun, in search of a tan. It's seems unfair that a tan is so temporary -- yet its damage is everlasting. And it seems crazy that so many people are still searching for a tan -- when it has become so clear that is it so harmful.

As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun -- mostly from malignant skin cancer -- according to the World Health Organization (WHO). About 48,000 deaths are caused by malignant melanomas, and 12,000 deaths are caused by other kinds of skin cancer. And 90 percent of these cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun. Cancer is not the only side effect of sun exposure, though -- serious sunburn, wrinkling, eye cataracts, growths on the flesh of the eye, cold sores, and other illness can result from the sun.

We all need some sun -- the vitamin D that is produced in the body by the sun helps to prevent disease and immune disorders. But too much is dangerous and sometimes deadly. Yet almost all ill effects from the sun can be prevented. And the WHO has released a report that advises people to seek shade, to use sunscreen with an SPF of at least 15, and to stay out of tanning salons. The report operates under the premise that sunscreens be used not to prolong sun exposure but to protect the skin when exposure is unavoidable.

Five years ago, when Michael Dunn's seven-year-old son Steven woke one morning with a swollen left eye, he took him to the emergency room thinking they would come home with eye drops for Steven. Instead, Steven became the 33rd known case of rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer striking soft body tissue, that had no long-term survivors over the age of 20.

Enter artist Connie Douglas. While doing some work in the Dunn home, she was in awe of Steven's spirit as he battled cancer that would most likely steal his life before he reached adulthood. Inspired by Steven, she contacted Phoenix Children's Hospital, with a proposal to create and donate artwork for the children who visited or stayed at the hospital.

The art project turned into nine wall story panels, and within each painted panel are hidden Shnnoogles. A Shnnoogle, which stands for caring and sharing, hugging and snuggling, giving in goodness and action, are furry snowball creatures with big round eyes. As children look at the panels, they search for the hidden Shnnoogles.

While Douglas was painting the panels, she was diagnosed with MS. To be equally inspired by Arizona Republic Kathleen Quilligan's feature Artist hopes Shnnoogles bring comfort to hospitalized kids, to find out how Steven and Connie are doing, and the book she plans to write, go here.