Lung Cancer: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Staging - Joshua R. Sonett, MD

Lung Cancer: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Staging - Joshua R. Sonett, MD

Confessions of a Cancer Patient

Sitting alone in a room for weeks on end, staring at the same walls; you wonder if anyone cares. Does anyone care at all? Of course, they care, they have unused in their busy workweek, that five or 30 minutes. It’s too dismal for them to attend, too depressing for them to spend, their off hours with an ailing friend.

They say, “No longer a productive member of society”, doesn’t hit until you know that you will never work again as your body starts to shrink. Pieces they cut off and out, never to return; you feel a monster, never to see the light of day again.

Society types, you once called colleagues, don’t know you and don’t call. Can you blame them? You were once there – struggling to get to the top or at the very least somewhere at ease.

But In a straight line, you no longer walk and your eyes and bone are weakening. Treatments they have given you, wounded, temporarily quelling the monster hiding in your body: they have done lasting damage.

Your skull feels unendingly searing now, your discomfort endless. Your bones ache, your ears ring unremittingly; you feel lightheaded, divided, and responsive from the medications you take. The question is no longer if… it’s when.

Preparing Non-Traditional Students for College Writing

Many nontraditional students who test into college preparatory writing programs, struggle with writing basics. This is crucial to acknowledge in light of the projected 19.8 million students enrolling for college level courses this year (Department of Ed., 2011). Personal experience and consideration of researched statistics confirm that a majority of these students are non-traditional students, enrolled in preparatory writing classes, and for whom it is likely to have been a long time since they were required to write formally. With focus on specific career goals of this growing student population, an approach to training in college writing requires reflection on factors such as previous education, work history, and  students attitude toward writing instruction.  

Special care given to instructional design adapts the traditional preparatory writing training to fit the busy adult lifestyles and to make content meaningful for career-minded students of disparate educational and professional backgrounds. Research and teaching experience in adult education demonstrate that a significant percentage of nontraditional students fear the writing process, are reluctant to see value in covering the basics of grammar, and do not understand why they need writing training.

This shows that the needs of these students is met by helping them understand how their degree goals benefit from increased writing skill and aids them with writing requirements throughout their specific program and in their subsequent careers’.

Student Need

The needs of nontraditional students are diverse and pose new demands on postsecondary institutions and the curriculum used for preparatory writing. A number of documented cases show how improving grammar and use for nontraditional students must shift to focus on use; thus, indicating that that traditional methodology currently employed for preparatory writing classes must defer from endless grammar worksheets and encourage students to write.

Complicating the Matter

Are you wrestling with your writing? Are you struggling with structure? No matter if you aspire to write short stories, novels, or are just plain blogging, you are likely to encounter roadblocks in plot development.

Plot development can be elusive, in that it incorporates many elements that engage your reader and keep them glued to the pages of your story. The short story is a great model, because we can examine it quickly and easily dissect it into component parts.

Four main divisions exist in the short story:

• Exposition: introduces problems or conflicts that familiarize your reader with your characters, the timeline of your story, the setting, and the circumstances.
• Rising Action: adds drama to the circumstances that immerse your characters and either endears them to your reader or alienates them from your reader. Either way, the reader wants to learn what happens to them next.
• Climax or Turning Point: is the pivotal point where your reader realizes their expectations of what happens to the protagonist or you can incorporate unexpected twists to shock and surprise.
• Conclusion: the falling action and carries the story to resolution or conclusion of the conflict.

Do not leave the reader flat with a conclusion that is underdeveloped. Construct a satisfactory balance for the reader that mirrors the exposition, not necessarily in length but in plot parallel. The conclusion should contain elements of surprise and careful interaction of the characters and their circumstances.

Three Strands

There are three strands of hair on the pillow
That nestled your head as you slept.
Tresses that no longer lay mellow,
Along the smooth line of your neck.

Each one a remembrance of airy, sparkling days,
And of warm, cherished moments as we sat and we gazed,
At the boats as they sailed to and from austral docks.
No worries for season schedule or clocks

Now I stare at the pillow, so cold and so bare
A slate of bone-white except for the hair
I dare not disturb ‘cept to whisper this prayer

Into the night…

In this dream - these strands - live my heart, soul and thought.
Clutching your promise, eyes tight, I fancy you'll be wrought,
So once more, I might brush that sweet curl from your brow.
Overlook. Through tears, a sweet pledge – avowed.

Into the light…

Now each day you're gone, my world comes apart.
Each day I collect the bits of my heart,
Begin to patch the wraith that dwells in recall
With three strands, to plat, intertwine – never pall.

~ By E.M. McKay

THREE STRANDS

For my Danny...


There are three strands of hair on the pillow
That nestled your head as you slept.
Tresses that no longer lay mellow,
Along the smooth line of your neck.

Each one a remembrance of airy, sparkling days,
And of warm, cherished moments as we sat and we gazed,
At the boats as they sailed to and from austral docks.
No worries for season schedule or clocks

Now I stare at the pillow, so cold and so bare
A slate of bone-white except for the hair
I dare not disturb ‘cept to whisper this prayer

Into the night…

In this dream - these strands - live my heart, soul and thought.
Clutching your promise, eyes tight, I fancy you'll be wrought,
So once more, I might brush that sweet curl from your brow.
Overlook. Through tears, a sweet pledge – avowed.

Into the light…

Now each day you're gone, my world comes apart.
Each day I collect the bits of my heart,
Begin to patch the wraith that dwells in recall
With three strands, to plat, intertwine – never pall.

~ By E.M. McKay

A Mountain in My Mind

Fall is my favorite season. Very dear to me are the rich and beautiful fall colors I see this time of year; resembling the changing leaves I remember from my youth in Vermont. For the most part, Florida remains in its evergreen state through the fall and still, this time of year always makes me sentimental. I daydream of being a girl and kicking my way through the mountain, it seemed to me then, of leaves piled high on the front lawn. All it takes is a crisp dry day or the sight of a lovely fall wreath to send me back.

In kind, the stories and poems I remember as a child are as magical for me today as they were then. The writers are immortalized forever in my mind. Robert Frost, Hans Christian Andersen, Walt Whitman…. As I sit here forming a philosophy about my desire to teach; I think it may, at least in part, be my childhood admiration for the stories that makes me devote myself to sharing this love for literature and writing with others.

I sit designing pedagogical outcomes for the upcoming semester, knowing that my methods will change and most definitely my interpretation of why I began in the first place. Many wonderful teachers along the way inspired in me the desire to dig, dissect, internalize, and to recapitulate how literature made me feel and what it meant.

My hope, as I embark on this journey, is that I encounter in my colleagues many more of those magical people who make me re-evaluate who I am and why I do what I do.

~ Cheers!

Eve McKay

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-- Robert Frost

Pasted from http://www.online-literature.com/frost/748/>