find it hard to believe that there is a person on this earth, who hasn't been affected in some way by cancer. Here on the Magdalen Islands, I hear of this one receiving treatment for cancer or she lost her husband or he lost his wife, to the disease. Even the children are not immune. It seems to me that everyone has the cancer inside them and it is only a matter of time before it springs to life.

n October 30th, 1982, I lost my mum to cancer. "My precious mum," I used to call her, was only 56 years old. How could this have happened? As children, my sister and I weren't even allowed to eat peanut butter because mum learned that it caused cancer. She worried because her closest friend, then her dad contracted the disease. Both died within months of finding out they had it. She feared the disease.

hen she got the lump. She went to the hospital, did the tests and was told it was only another cyst. A few days later, she went for a second opinion. There must have been something that told her this lump was different. She was sent to Montreal for surgery, a full mastectomy of one breast, then a year or more of Chemotherapy. She went through hell, with a smile on her face. "It was just one less part to wash," she said. She was going to beat cancer.... She died just more than two years after cancer was discovered and we, her daughters watched as the life slipped away from our precious mum. Twenty-five years later and I'm still crying, because I lost my mum to cancer. She was a cigarette smoker for 18 years of her life, but had quit 10 years before getting the disease. The damage had been done, by cigarettes and by several car accidents that damaged her chest severely when the steering wheels broke on impact.

he disease also took my dad on January 9th, 1991. He never seemed to be bothered about cancer, but when he developed malignant tumors in his liver, it was like he gave up. He was given a year to live but died within weeks, refusing all treatment. He had a taste of the treatment the year before, when a remnant tumor was found behind a tonsil and he underwent cobalt radiation therapy. It was successful, the doctors said. He was just sixty-four years old.

ow a close cousin of mine is fighting for her life. She has two teenage children who now are watching their young mother, suffer the horrid treatments, just the same way I did all those years ago. Still another cousin very close to me has her husband in the hospital, their young adult children sitting up with him at night, fearing it would be his last. Waiting, hoping that he takes another breath. That is what cancer is, what it does to the families of its victims. It makes everyone it's victim.

believe..., I believe we can find a cure. I believe that with all of my heart, that no one ever need die of cancer again. It just takes all that we can give to find the cures soon than later....