Cancer

Is there anything left in life that isn't linked in some way to cancer? Not hot tea apparently. An international group of scientists has now connected it with esophageal cancer. The problem doesn't appear to be the tea itself, but the temperature at which it is consumed, their study found. Residents of Golestan province in northern Iran have one of the highest rates of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in the world.

One night in April 2007, as Mike Partain hugged his wife before going to bed, she felt a small lump above his right nipple. A mammogram -- a "man-o-gram," he called it -- led to a diagnosis of male breast cancer. Six days later, the 41-year-old insurance adjuster had a mastectomy. Partain had no idea men could get breast cancer. But he thinks he knows what caused his: contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where he was born. Over the last two years, Partain has compiled a list of 19 others diagnosed with male breast cancer who once lived on the base.

One afternoon last fall at Warner Bros. studios, Jessica Queller found herself acting more like a middle-aged woman than the youthful TV writer that she is. While tossing out lines for the headmistress, a new character on "Gossip Girl," the popular teenage soap opera she works on, Queller began formalizing her diction and sitting erect as a chalkboard to channel the drab disciplinarian. So what did her colleagues do? As a joke, they named the character "Headmistress Queller." "I found out when I saw it on TV," Queller said recently over lunch, smiling as she recalled the moment that made her very cool with her little cousins.

Just when all of us in Lakerland thought it was safe to go back in the water, along came another Celtics shark, chomping on our self-satisfaction. It was a perfect Southern California summer night in Beverly Hills on Thursday. Nice charity dinner, great cause, more basketball stars in the room than you'll see on NBA All-Star weekend. As Jerry West said, "There is more star power here than at the ESPYs." And he, of course, would be counted in that. Yes, there was plenty to feel good about, and certainly no expectation that somebody from the city where they call a park a pawk would steal the limelight.

In the 1890s, a New York surgeon named William Coley tested a radical cancer treatment. He took a hypodermic needle teeming with bacteria and plunged it into the flesh of patients. After suffering through weeks of chills and fevers, many showed significant regression of their tumors, but even Coley himself could not explain the phenomenon. His experiments were sparked by the observation that certain cancer patients improved after contracting infections.

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Democratic presidential contender John Edwards, said she and John McCain have one thing in common: "Neither one of us would be covered by his health policy." Edwards lodged her criticism of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's proposal Saturday at the annual meeting of the Assn. of Health Care Journalists. Under McCain's plan, insurance companies "wouldn't have to cover preexisting conditions like melanoma and breast cancer," she said.

It was the kind of comeback that teenager Ryan Freydig had hoped for during his 100 hours of chemotherapy. Diagnosed with testicular cancer two days after Christmas, the Hemet high school senior had to put much of his life on hold. That included his role as a starting pitcher for the West Valley High School Mustangs baseball team.

Melanomas like those suffered by Sen. John McCain are more lethal than other types of skin cancers because the pigment-producing melanocytes that produce them are actually not skin cells at all. Though the basal cells and squamous cells that are responsible for the most common types of skin cancer are integral parts of the skin from the beginning, melanocytes are visitors -- nerve cells that are produced in the spinal column during infancy before migrating to the skin.

Like almost everyone their age, young adult cancer survivors are into the Web. The following sites help them deal with the aftermath of cancer: * A national list of transition programs for childhood and adult cancer survivors is available at www.acor.org/ped-onc /treatment/surclinics.html. These programs help adults piece together treatment records and develop preventive care-plans. * seventyk.org Named for the 70,000 new young adults diagnosed with cancer in the U.S.

As young survivors of the modern era of cancer treatment enter the third and fourth decades of their lives, they find themselves poster children for the hope of medical progress -- and also for the toll taken by cancer's toxic treatments. The cure rate for childhood cancer is one of 20th century medicine's greatest success stories. Before 1970, few children with cancer made it. Today, nearly 80% of children who have cancer are cured, according to the American Cancer Society's 2008 statistics.