"It feels sometimes like the entire world has cancer"

The NY Times today has a terrific profile of M.D. Anderson, the cancer hospital in Houston, TX. This is where my aunt Sylvia was treated for years--they helped her to become one of the longest-surviving multiple myeloma patients they'd seen--until she was too sick to make the drive from San Antonio on a regular basis. This article is also incredibly sad, and it's a bit scary for me to read about the nurse who beat breast cancer only to see it recur as metastatic disease 9 years later. Next year will be 4 years for me, and I take none of them for granted.