Journal+5

Kazakos 1 Ashley Kazakos Mr. Ward English 1 April 1, 2011 Diagnosed At a Young Age

One day Nicole went down to the school nurse complaining of a headache. The nurse gave her some Advil and he went back to class. For some reason her headache wouldn’t go away. She has this headache for a couple weeks. One morning she came down crying because her head was hurting that badly. This was really unusual for such a small kid. She was about 10 at this time. Finally Nicole’s parents decided to take her to the doctor for it. The doctor said a number of things could cause this and he just gave her a prescription and hopefully it would go away. The prescription didn’t work though. She was having more and more headaches. They then decided to go back to the doctor. The doctor finally sent Nicole for some tests. After a couple sleepless nights the tests finally came back. They showed tests came back that she had a tumor in her brain. Her world was completely turned upside-down. 10 years old and thinking you have a tumor is crazy. They did some more and they found out that it’s cancerous. Cancer is a disease where abnormal cells in the body start to grow out of control. This can cause you to be really sick or even die. More and more people are starting to live from this disease however. In 1960 about one in 3 people lived from cancer, and now it’s about 50%. There’s starting to be an okay survival rate. About 10,400 kids 15 and under were diagnosed with cancer in the U.S., and about 1,545 of them will die. Also from 1975- 1977 the 5-year survival rate was 58.1 percent. From 1996- 2003 the survival rate increased to 79.6 percent. There are lots of places working on new treatments and medicines for this. One of the good ones is Penn sate. Penn state Hershey medical center just opened a brand new caner facility in 2009.