For years, newspaper columnist Al Martinez has shared stories about his children with readers. In today’s Los Angeles Times, Mr. Martinez is asking his readers to share their own stories of hope.

Mr. Martinez reports that his eldest daughter, Cindy, has been diagnosed with cancer that has spread to her liver. The diagnosis has him reflecting on the day he first met his daughter in 1952, when she was nearly a year old. He had missed the birth because he was a marine stationed in Korea. A Red Cross worker had originally told him he was the father of a baby girl named Sarah. Weeks later he learned her name was actually Cinthia.

I still call her Sarah occasionally; it’s a joke we share, Sarah and I. I write about her today because she, and all of our family, is involved in a different kind of war; more insidious in a way. Cindy has cancer.

It was discovered some weeks ago, a finding that took a part of her large intestine during subsequent surgery. The surgeon noticed that it had spread to her liver. Soon chemo will begin to shrink the tumor, and then it will be removed.

We discover in adversity what we are composed of. We suffer the shock of painful news, cry tears of self-pity and then, if there is steel in us, we march on. Cindy is going forward like a warrior into the fray with a toughness that I had expected from her. I know this girl….

I’m putting her name in print today so that you can tell me stories of your own fight against cancer; so you can help our family find the strength and courage to defeat the enemy within…. Cindy was handed to me a long time ago and occupies a special place in my life and in my heart, and I’m not about to hand her back.

To learn more, read “Looking For Strength to Fight Cancer.”

Every week, Times editor Dana Jennings writes about his experiences coping with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

By Dana Jennings

Long before I started writing publicly about my prostate cancer, I wrote about it for myself.

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

Since the mid-’90s, I’ve kept a journal, mainly to take my mental temperature, and as a hedge against forgetting. I’m one of those people who needs to explain himself to himself. I never truly know what I’m thinking until I’m hunched over a notebook, razor-point pen poised above a blank page.

I wrote my first journal entry about prostate cancer last March, when I learned I had a 50-50 chance of having the disease.

March 19: It makes no sense to freak out right now. And, to be honest, it makes no sense to freak out if I do have cancer.

Since then, my journal has been a record of my highs, lows and everything in between on the cancer road. I never imagined at the time that these very private thoughts would be made public. At first, I was still trying to figure out how to have cancer. I was stunned but trying to be a good stoic, as I’d been taught as a kid back home in New Hampshire.

April 9: I found out two days ago that I have prostate cancer. I’m not angry. I’m not sad. I’m not depressed — it is what it is. … I wouldn’t choose to have cancer, but it does represent the opportunity to engage in an unexpected and serious spiritual adventure.

Keeping a written record of having cancer isn’t rare, and studies suggest that such writing can help patients cope better with their illnesses and even improve the quality of their lives. For me, keeping a prostate cancer journal lets me slow down, take a deep breath and potentially shrug off the hurry-up-and-wait hysteria that arrives with the disease.

Even when faced with life-changing situations, we tend toward forgetting. My journal lets me recall all the phases and stages of my prostate cancer. Sometimes, I don’t write full entries but just a couple words — kind of like Post-It notes to myself. Even so, they’re enough to remind me of the deep April dusk when my wife, Deb, told me that I had cancer (she had picked up the call from my urologist and I wasn’t home yet), or the post-op pleasure of shuffling around the neighborhood in my bathrobe — when you have cancer, you really don’t care what anyone else thinks.

And while I have worked hard to keep a good attitude, my journal has been a safe place to confess my deepest fears and sadness.

May 1: I am angry and raw, tired and hungry — feeling a bit feral, a bit mangy.

May 5: For a month now, I’ve been at loose ends, trying to be worthy of my situation, trying to be an example to my sons.

May 16: Ah, God, the Depression arrived this morning the way the heavy rain arrived — I couldn’t resist it. … I’m not persuaded at all that a complete recovery is assured. … The fact of my cancer is inescapable. As inescapable as your shadow on a sunny day.

An essential part of my journaling experience is handled by my wife — whom we lovingly call the Mistress of Minutiae. She has put together a comprehensive medical binder that details every blood test, every scan, every conversation with a doctor. Sometimes I flip through it, fascinated by the arcane details of my disease — like how it took 25 staples to close me up after my surgeon removed my prostate. It has also proved to be an invaluable resource as my wife and I have negotiated the health care system.

While there are many practical reasons to keep a prostate cancer journal, for me it’s also an act of defiance.

I grew up in a rural family whose members prided themselves on nursing bitter secrets — hoarded them like silver dollars — including their cancers: my maternal great-grandmother, my mother’s parents and a couple uncles and aunts were all killed by cancer. And most of them, until they were betrayed by seeping blood and withering flesh, said nothing about being sick.

In many ways, their silence and shame helped kill them. I keep my journal to defy that epidemic of silence. A journal lets each one of us sing a private song that shatters the silence that too often surrounds this cancer or any cancer.

May 22: The stress of cancer can be overwhelming. There’s the disease itself — burrowing and devouring, even as you outwardly look healthy as you rot from the inside. There’s the uncertainty of the health care bureaucracy — finding the right pair of hands, finding the payment. And there’s simply uncertainty.

Most days, I try not to think too much about having cancer — I rejoice in those times when I am just myself and not a “cancer patient” — but I am grateful for these in-the-moment dispatches and wonder what truths the coming year will unveil. Ultimately, I hope that these entries won’t just tell a tale of disease, but one, too, of healing.

July 1: Am I afraid? I don’t think so. I love this sweet ol’ world, and I want more of it. I’m not ready to leave, and it doesn’t feel as if it’s time to go. But, I suppose, that it’s possible. … This is what it still comes down to for me: a quiet corner, a piece of paper and a pen.

Less than two months ago, my colleague Dana Jennings told me that he was looking for a way to write about his prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. Days later, he submitted his first post, “The Good Cancer,” which appeared on Nov. 11. Since then, the Well blog every Tuesday has featured weekly insights from Dana about his experience as a prostate cancer patient living with an aggressive form of the disease.

Recently, Dana took part in the Best of Well podcast to talk about life as a prostate cancer blogger. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. Read more…

Every week, New York Times editor Dana Jennings writes about his experiences living with prostate cancer. This week, instead of his regular blog post, Dana has invited us into his home to meet his family and learn more about his treatment in the latest Well video, “Living With Prostate Cancer,” produced by my colleague, Times video journalist Dave Frank.

In the video, he talks about the overwhelming response from readers since he began writing about his cancer in mid-November.

“I think being willing to be blunt and honest about having prostate cancer really gave this group of men and women permission to talk about things that I don’t think any of them have talked about,” Dana says. “Literally, I feel since that first post went up on November 11, that my life has changed.”

Hear more from Dana by watching the full video, below. Then join in the discussion by adding a comment. To read all of Dana’s past posts about living with prostate cancer, click on the Prostate Cancer Journal icon, “One Man’s Story,” above.

People with more lean muscle mass may have an advantage when it comes to fighting cancer, new research suggests.

The study, published in the medical journal Lancet Oncology, is the latest to suggest a patient’s body composition may play a role in cancer survival rates. Researchers from the University of Alberta used body scan imaging to study 250 obese cancer patients. The scans showed that 15 percent of the cancer patients had very low muscle mass relative to their weight.

The obese patients with the lower levels of lean muscle mass lived an average of 10 months less than patients with more muscle mass, even after controlling for other variables like cancer stage and severity.

Other studies have shown that people who exercise have lower rates of some types of cancer. Although the study suggests that higher levels of lean muscle mass help the body better cope with cancer, it’s not clear whether lifting weights prior to or after a diagnosis would improve a patient’s odds for surviving the disease. “That would be the next experiment,” said Dr. Vickie Baracos, a professor of oncology and adjunct professor of human nutrition at the University of Alberta, and lead author on the study. “This intervention has not been tested.”

The data also raise questions about whether body composition should be considered as doctors make treatment decisions and assess a patient’s prognosis. A patient with very low lean body mass, for instance, may be given a more tailored dose of chemotherapy, Dr. Baracos said.

Patients who have been treated for cancer should talk to their doctor before embarking on any exercise routine. For instance, patients who have undergone lymph node removal are at risk for a severe swelling disorder called lymphedema and may be advised against lifting weights.

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

For the past five weeks, Dana Jennings, an editor at The New York Times, has shared his story of life as a prostate cancer patient. We’ve heard how the disease is often wrongly referred to as “the good cancer,” and learned about the emasculating side effects of treatment. He has shared stories about lessons learned, the intimate and often difficult changes in a man’s sex life and the surprising emotional toll of the disease.

In Tuesday’s Science Times, Dana writes about how the detached world of medicine often treats men with prostate cancer. Sometimes men are viewed as statistics, rather than individuals. Other doctors see patients as rare, scientific studies of disease. None of which has anything to do with the real man standing in front of them. Dana writes:

Nearly 200,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year, and nearly 30,000 men die. This is serious, life-changing stuff: There’s blood in your urine, a catheter snaked up your penis, scars stitch your gut, and you might be impotent and incontinent for a few months, a couple of years, or the rest of your life.

Prostate cancer — any cancer — is a crucible in which we patients are somehow, we hope, reborn. It’s a rite of passage as resonant as any other — a graduation, a baptism, a wedding — and should be treated that way. Some days, maybe because I’m still undergoing treatment, I don’t want to hear about another stat, another study, another harebrained cure. How about a smile, a kind word and a hug?

Prostate cancer is an abstraction in the same way that global warming was an abstraction, until the world saw the photograph of that forlorn polar bear trapped on an ice floe. It should be the goal of each one of my brothers-in-disease to become that bear.

The rest of the column, “Person, Patient, Statistic” is here. And to read past essays from Dana, read his Prostate Cancer Journal. Join Dana in the discussion below by posting a comment.

A particularly fast-growing form of breast cancer should be treated aggressively after surgery even when tumors are very small, according to new research that could dramatically alter treatment for one in five women diagnosed with breast cancer.

The research, reported on Friday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, focuses on the 15 percent to 20 percent of women with breast cancer who test positive for an amplification of the HER2 gene, which is typically among the most aggressive forms of the disease. Read more…

Every week, New York Times editor Dana Jennings shares his experiences coping with prostate cancer.

By Dana Jennings

I have prostate cancer, and sometimes I get mad. Not upset. Not annoyed. Not nettled. Mad. This isn’t mere “why me” moaning. My rage is pure and primal, like that of a wolf caught in a steel trap.

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

My anger, though, doesn’t arrive when and where you’d think it would. Gliding into the radiation machine, getting a hormone shot and wearing mini-man-pads don’t set me off. It’s smaller, less expected, things, like a fellow customer being mean and rude to the server behind the counter at Starbucks, or a car busting a red light as I walk to my New York office.

That kind of behavior has always bothered me on some level. But since I learned that I have cancer, I react differently. I’ve walked the streets of New York for decades, and not thought twice about the cars that run red lights and nearly nail me and other pedestrians. It’s a fact of life in the big city, like rats on the subway tracks. I used to shrug and keep walking.

Since my diagnosis last April, though, and especially since my prostatectomy last July, it has not been so easy for me to shrug it off. Perhaps it’s because prostate cancer and its treatment have left me feeling vulnerable. Now, it’s as if a heedless speeding car pulls some small biological trigger of agitation that too quickly metastasizes into rage. Suddenly, I’m howling at the traffic. If I could, I’d turn green and bellow: “Hulk smash!!!”

In utter mortification, I admit that I have shocked at least a couple of drivers with a quick thump to the rear-ends of their cars. I’m not proud of this. But it’s almost as if, in certain situations, my cancer is granting me permission to tap a dark and ugly passion. My tolerance for bad behavior has vanished, and I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. And anger, no matter how bitter, still tastes good, at least for a moment. Read more…

Every week, New York Times editor Dana Jennings shares his experiences coping with prostate cancer.

By Dana Jennings

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Eight months after learning that I had prostate cancer, my sex drive has vanished into a drug-induced limbo.

As recently as two weeks ago, my libido hadn’t yet checked out. But since then, hormone injections — like the oncologist’s elves — have kept doing their job, which is to suppress testosterone. No testosterone, no sex drive, and, my doctors and I hope, eventually no prostate cancer.

But even with the promise of being cured, the physical changes in my sex life and, more shockingly, my recent loss of interest in sex, are among the most difficult aspects of having prostate cancer — not just for me, but for my wife, too. Men often don’t want to talk about these changes, as if words and impotence couldn’t possibly coexist.

But we men need to talk about it. Silence is the enemy when it comes to any disease. If we can talk about it, it will help us, help our spouses and help those who come after us. Read more…

Every week, New York Times editor Dana Jennings shares his experiences coping with prostate cancer.

By Dana Jennings

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

Prostate cancer is a dark waltz, not the raging battle of popular imagination. From that first elevated PSA blood test, to the biopsy, to treatment, to those evil twins of impotence and incontinence and beyond, I’m still learning some very complicated steps more than seven months after my diagnosis.

Cancer is a hard teacher. No matter how much you glean from the Web, how many fellow travelers you talk to, how many questions you ask nurses and doctors, there are some lessons — physical, practical, emotional — that can only be learned firsthand.

I confess that I feel utterly vulnerable. But, as the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among the mysteries.” So, as I continue to move among these mysteries, here are 10 nuggets of prostate cancer wisdom that I had to learn for myself. Read more…

Hormone therapy to shrink or slow the growth of prostate cancer is one of the most common treatments for the disease. New York Times editor Dana Jennings, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year, talks about his own treatment with the drug Lupron.

By Dana Jennings

The day after my most recent hormone injection for prostate cancer, I told my wife, Deb, that I had a headache, hot flashes, cramps and was very, very hungry.

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

She said, “Sweetie, you’re having your period.” We both laughed. (Laughter is a crucial therapy in my treatment.)

Those are just a few of the side effects I’ve been experiencing on Lupron, which is part of the hormonal treatment for my advanced case of prostate cancer. Lupron is a testosterone suppressant, designed to starve hormone-dependent cancer cells of the fuel (testosterone) that they crave in order to grow. My doctors believe, and studies indicate, that using hormonal therapy to complement my radiation treatments, which are scheduled to start next month, will give me a better chance of being cured, of survival.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve also had back, joint and muscle aches, random itchiness: that spider-crawling-on-your-skin feeling, cotton mouth, sudden fatigue and fleeting bursts of pain in my jaw, chest and armpits. These are not complaints, just observations.

Oh, and my testicles are shrinking. Read more…

The majority of people diagnosed with cancer are over 65, but most major cancer studies exclude them, leaving a wide gap in knowledge about how best to treat older patients.

The knowledge gap about older cancer patients was highlighted recently by researchers from Barcelona who studied the role that age played in the prognosis of 224 cancer patients.

According to the National Cancer Institute, 60 percent of newly diagnosed cancers are found in people over the age of 65. Overall, people in this age group are 10 times more likely to get cancer, and 15 times more likely to die from the disease, than are people under the age of 65.

But even though most cancer patients are older, age is typically not the deciding factor in whether someone survives the illness, the Spanish researchers showed. Read more…

More than two million American men are currently living with prostate cancer, yet the national conversation about the disease consistently falls short. My colleague Dana Jennings, a writer and editor for The Times, was diagnosed with prostate cancer seven months ago. He has generously offered to share some of his experiences with the disease as a regular contributor to the Well blog.

By Dana Jennings

There is no such thing as a “good cancer.” When my prostate cancer was diagnosed last April, I can’t tell you how many well-meaning friends and acquaintances said: “At least you have a good cancer.” What they were trying to say is that prostate cancer is often very treatable when detected in its early stages. Even so, nearly 30,000 American men died last year of “the good cancer.”

Dana Jennings. (Lonnie Schlein/The New York Times)

My cancer did appear to fall within the range of the ordinary. Treatment is still treatment, though, and a prostatectomy, no matter the method, is major surgery, with the twin shadows of impotence and incontinence always present.

But after my radical open prostatectomy on July 7, the pathology report revealed that my cancer wasn’t so ordinary, after all, and showed what one doctor called a “somewhat extraordinary scenario.” My apparently run-of-the-mill prostate cancer was actually an aggressive star among such cancers.

Rather than being a typically slow and pokey prostate cancer, mine had marched beyond the prostate and invaded a seminal vesicle and other tissue. It was a pure and aggressive prostate cancer. Read more…

Dr. Ron Davis. (John Nowak for The New York Times)

I was sad to learn that Dr. Ron Davis, who has devoted his life to public health, died recently as a result of pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Davis was featured recently in the Voices of Pancreatic Cancer and highlighted in a Science Times column “Armed With Knowledge, Driven to Fight.”

“We could wallow in a state of depression, resigning ourselves to the fact that I’m a goner,” Dr. Davis said. “Or we can choose to take each day as something to cherish.”

As you read more about Dr. Davis, you’ll see how much we all owe him for his efforts toward improving public health.

With speeches and lectures, with articles in peer journals and on Web sites, with surveys and health bulletins, with legal depositions and testimony before Congressional committees and state and federal agencies, Dr. Davis was a tenacious campaigner for healthy lifestyles and for promoting fitness, exercise, better diets and an awareness of the corrosive effects of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs.

Many people gobble big doses of vitamin C in hopes of boosting their immune system and warding off illness. But new research shows that in people with cancer, the vitamin may do more harm than good.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York studied the effects of vitamin C on cancer cells. As it turns out, the vitamin seems to protect not just healthy cells, but cancer cells, too. The findings were published today in the journal Cancer Research.

“The use of vitamin C supplements could have the potential to reduce the ability of patients to respond to therapy,” said Dr. Mark Heaney, an associate attending physician at the cancer center, in a press release. Read more…