50 Interesting Facts about Cancer You Got to Know

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

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

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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."

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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

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

35. 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.

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.

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

38. 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.

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

40. 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.

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

42. 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.

43. 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.

44. 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.

45. Over the objections of their supervisors and colleagues, Dr. Emil Freireich and Dr. Emil Frei tackled children's Leukemia with a combination chemotherapy with 4 different kinds of drugs. Today, the cure rate for this form of cancer is more than 90%.

Timothy Ray Brown is the only human ever cured of HIV. He had the virus for 11 years before developing leukemia. When he was given a bone marrow transplant, the HIV virus disappeared. His blood has been studied for years but there’s still no definitive answer as to why he recovered.

47. After visiting with Humphrey Bogart, who was suffering from esophageal cancer, Spencer Tracy gave Bogart a pat on the shoulder and said "Goodnight, Bogie." Bogart placed his hand on Tracy's and replied: "Goodbye, Spence." Bogart fell into a coma and died the next day.

48. Professional hockey player Luke Piggott made a huge breakthrough in the fight against breast cancer when he discovered how to kill breast cancer stem cells. He trains every morning with his team and then heads straight to the lab to conduct his cancer research.

49. Research has found that ecstasy also known as MDMA has robust anticancer properties, particularly for leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma.

50. Michael C. Hall wore a wig for season 5 of Dexter because of hair loss due to chemotherapy for his Hodgkins Lymphoma.