1. My Life Without Me: This is a story about a young working mother named Ann with two daughters and a husband. She lives with her family in a tiny trailer in her mother's backyard. After she collapses one day she goes to the doctor who gives her grave news. She tells no one. Ann's emotional journey leads her to unexpected places and gives her life new meaning: the tender moments, the volatile emotions she must keep inside, the recognition that she has the power to understand, examine and fully live her own life.
2. Sweet November: Each month free-spirited Sara starts a new relationship. her task is to take a month to make one man become a better person, and then she moves on. While November rolls around and Sara targets a busy Tycoon, she does not plan on falling in love. But they do, and as a result, Nelson learns the painful secret behind the brevity of Sara's romances.
3. The Family Stone: A comedy with heart. This story is about an annual holiday gathering of an unconventional New England family. Before the holidays are done, relationships will unravel while new ones are formed, secrets will be revealed and the Stone family will come together though its extraordinary capacity for love.
4. The Doctor: Jack is a doctor with it all. He is then diagnosed with throat cancer. Now that he has seen medicine, hospitals, and doctors from the patient's perspective, he realizes there is more to being a doctor than surgery and prescriptions.
5. Fine Things: Bernie Fine, a is a home loving New Yorker. One day, while walking the floors he meets Jane, a little girl who has lost her mother. When they find her mother, Liz, Bernie is enchanted with her and they become involved and eventually marry. Liz becomes pregnant, but their joy is short lived as after their son, Alexander, is born Liz is diagnosed with Leukemia.
6. Wit: This is a story about a women receiving treatment for ovarian cancer. She is in the hospital bed showing what life is like for a cancer patient, most likely going to die from her disease, to hold on to her wit.
7. Stepmom: Jackie and Isabel have nothing in common--one is the ideal mother, the other is struggling to be any kind of mother--until circumstances force them to share a family and put aside their mutual hostility for the sake of the children. They discover how precious life, love and the ties that bind them really are in this tale about the intricate circumstances surrounding what happens when a man's new wife learns from his former wife that she is terminally ill with cancer.
   

There's been much press lately about the cervical cancer vaccine, its merits, its implications, and the debate surrounding the issue of vaccinating young girls against the sexually transmitted virus HPV.

Enter a new vaccine -- the ovarian cancer vaccine.

Early clinical trial results are promising for this vaccine, intended to fight off ovarian cancer tumors with patients' own cells -- but without the toxicity of traditional chemotherapy.

Says Dr. Ed Staren of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, "We're able to identify the specific components of the tumor and target it for individual therapy for the patient."

Doctors would surgically remove a patient's tumor and then send it to a lab where tumor cells would be used to create a vaccine specifically for the patient.

A second round of clinical trials to study the effectiveness of this vaccine will begin this summer.

We recently posted Elephant Man drug trial victim showing signs of cancer, about a horrific ordeal involving six healthy young men who volunteered at Northwick Park Hospital, in London as participants in a clinical trial for a drug called TGN1412, designed to treat leukemia, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

According to the men, they were told by doctors there would be no serious short-term or long-term side effects from participating in the drug trial. That wasn't the case. The participants were misled regarding the safety of the experimental drug -- everything went terribly wrong -- and one of the six men has now been told he is showing signs of cancer.

Another egregious event has occurred on the other side of the pond, according to news of an allegation made by a woman who claims she was used as an experimental cancer drug guinea pig without consent.

The story began last year when Trelene Cave was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Treated at Epsom General Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, she was later sent to St George's Hospital for a second opinion before undergoing an operation. The trouble begins when St George's Hospital doctors allegedly treated Cave with Scotroc4, an experimental cancer drug, without her informed consent. She developed a blood clot and almost died.

Cave states in the news report that, "I trusted them totally. Nobody discussed it with me. I just can't understand it."

St George's Healthcare Trust has apologized to her and her husband Norman for the incident. An investigation has been called for into whether St George's Hospital doctors side-stepped ethical guidelines in treating Cave without her knowledge.

Thanks to Joel Arellano of Autoblog for this story tip!

Joining such notable poet laureates as Robert Frost, Rita Dove, Billy Collins and James Dickey, New Hampshire poet Donald Hall has become the 14th United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

South Carolina's poet laureate Marjory Wentworth writes in Poet laureate writes of ordinary things that Hall is one of America's most distinguished and respected literary figures. Educated at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, he is an award-winning writer who has published 18 books of poetry, a memoir, essay collections and children's books.

In a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire, near where Robert Frost once lived, Hall shared a life with his wife poet Jane Kenyon for more than thirty years -- before her death to cancer. Bill Moyers featured the couple in the Emmy Award-winning documentary film A Life Together. Filmed in 1993, Hall had then recently recovered from cancer. Hall said at the time that the odds were against him living another ten years. Hall beat the odds. Kenyon did not.

Kenyon was in the prime of life, being in her 40's, when she died of leukemia, and Hall often speaks of her life and death with his poetry now published in a book called Without.

Wentworth says in her review of Without, "For anyone who has lost someone they love to cancer or any other illness, this collection of poems will touch you and provide solace. The day-to-day details will be painfully familiar, but it is a good thing to read his words and share in his grief. His gift is his ability to describe the kind of pain and loss that is indescribable for the rest of us."

When Wentworth attended a memorial reading in his wife's honor, she said Hall stated, "My heart is broken, and now I am breaking the world's heart." In addition to Wentworth's review, you can read an interview in conversation with Donald Hall and Judith Moore here.