Cancer: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Disease: 35 Facts

C.S. Lewis (British novelist) entered a civil marriage with a woman named Joy Davidman so she could avoid deportation. Then, after she developed terminal cancer, they eventually fell in love and re-married while she was in the hospital. They were married for 3 years before she passed away.

2. A man named Billy Owen lost an eye and half his face to cancer, and used it to start a career as a zombie actor.

3. After the death of his wife from breast cancer, actor Rick Moranis began an 18-year-long hiatus from acting to raise his children.

4. There are more skin cancer cases attributed to tanning beds than lung cancer cases attributed to smoking.

5. The rate of lung cancer is lower in Japan than in the US despite a higher percentage of smokers in Japan. This is known as Japanese Smoking paradox

There are "cancer villages" in China, where residents are hundreds of times more susceptible to cancer due to pollution.

7. After losing his wife from breast cancer, a 57-year-old man named Terry Hitchcock with a prior heart attack attempted to run 75 marathons in 75 consecutive days for single parent awareness. He succeeded.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

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

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

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.

17. 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.

18. 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."

19. 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.

20. 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.

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.

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

23. 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.

24. 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.

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