35 Surprising Facts About Cancer and the Human Body

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1J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling wrote to Natalie McDonald, a leukemia patient, the ending of The Goblet of Fire a year early. She died before reading the email so Rowling named a character after her. That character was sorted into Gryffindor.


2. Jack Hanna (American zookeeper) initially accepted the director position at the Columbus Zoo because he believed Children's Hospital of Columbus had the best care for his daughter, who had been diagnosed with leukemia.


3. Vanessa Bayer of SNL was sent to Hawaii on a "Make-a-Wish" trip as a teen because she had leukemia. She beat cancer, graduated from the Ivy League, and now does charity work with the organization.


4. The Make A Wish Foundation granted 12-year-old leukemia survivor Declan McLean-Pauley's wish to blow a bunch of sh*t up.


5. The actor who played the dying Maurice Fisher in Inception, Pete Postlethwaite, was really dying of cancer. He died 5 months after the film's release.


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6Parasitic worm

Parasitic worm

In 2013, an HIV-positive Colombian man died after his parasitic worm got cancer.


7. Jack Ruby, the guy who killed Oswald on live TV, claimed that the JFK assassination "was an act of overthrowing the government" and that he had been injected with cancer cells in prison to silence him. By 1966, Ruby was dead from cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain.


8. A child only displaying redeye in one eye in a photograph, should be immediately checked for retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina.


9. St Jude's Hospital, which has treated thousands of children with cancer, is not religiously affiliated, and instead was founded by actor Danny Thomas because of a promise to the patron saint of lost causes after he found success in Hollywood.


10. There has been a reported case of human-to-human cancer transmission, where a surgeon cut his hand while resecting a tumor and seeded the patient's cancer cells on his hand.


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11Marlboro men

Marlboro men

Three Marlboro men Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer died of lung cancer.


12. Terry Fox was a 21-year-old one-legged cancer patient who ran 3,339 miles across Canada in 143 days before dying. He ran the equivalent of a full marathon every day and was the youngest person ever named a Companion of the Order of Canada.


13. To treat bladder cancer, doctors inject cow tuberculosis bacteria up the patient's urethra. The subsequent immune reaction destroys cancer cells, and the treatment has been shown to be more effective than chemotherapy.


14. Using a basic food-reward system, normal household dogs were trained to detect both lung and breast cancer with 90-100% success rate when checked by biopsy-confirmation, only by smelling patients' breath. This was also after only a few weeks of training.


15. Actress Bette Davis lived through 4 marriages, 4 strokes, breast cancer, and paralysis and died at the age of 81. Her epitaph reads "She did it the hard way."


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16Lipstick

Lipstick

Lipstick may contain metal in toxic amounts. Daily use of lipstick and/or lip gloss may expose women to excessive amounts of the metal chromium which is associated with stomach cancer. Also, 75% of products tested contain lead. There is no way for consumers to find out a product's metal content.


17. Anchorman Peter Jennings, who passed away from lung cancer in 2005, had actually quit smoking around 1985 but started the habit again from the stress of 9/11.


18. President Grover Cleveland had cancer and had surgery in secret on his yacht. This was to avoid the stigma of cancer at the time.


19. If a man pees on a pregnancy test and it's positive, he probably has cancer.


20. An 18-year-old teenager named Elana Simon helped scientists study her own rare type of cancer, and together they discovered a gene flaw possibly involved in the disease's growth.


21Stroke Belt

Stroke Belt

The "Stroke Belt" is a region of the South Eastern U.S. with unusually higher rates of diabetes, stroke and lung cancer than the rest of the country.


22. Researchers have taken the HIV virus, modified it and then used it to reprogram cancer patients' white blood cells to attack and completely kill off cancer.


23. Richard Harris (original Dumbledore) trolled diners and said "It was the food!" as he was being taken from his hotel on a stretcher shortly before he died of cancer.


24. A guy named Stamatis Moraitis diagnosed with cancer was told he had 6 months to live. He went back to the doctors 10 years later to tell them that he's still alive only to find out that the doctors who diagnosed him were all dead. He died 102 years old.


25. Psy was sentenced to 25 days in jail for marijuana possession and as a result was unable to be with his grandfather when he lost his battle with cancer, or attend his funeral.

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