Story:

Hi, I’m a cell near the spinal cord on my host. My host says his name is Josh Sherman every time he introduces himself to someone new, so that’s what we call him here in the skin. My job today is to tell you the story of how my person, Josh Sherman, got invaded by spinal tumors.

One day me and my cellular friends were doing our jobs when suddenly, Josh’s back started hurting. I started seeing the cells around me, closer to his spine, started reproducing much faster than they should’ve. I started observing them more and I saw that their amino acids were not being built in the right order, I suppose that the mRNA mixed up the letters somehow and that made it so the proteins were built different than they should have been.

Later on, it started to hurt so bad that he could barely move and his arms and legs started going numb. We all new this wasn’t a good sign, so did Josh, since he works in a hospital in the radiation department. Soon enough, I was surrounded by a mass of cells. Josh kept saying to himself that he was fine, it was just him getting older, but we all new. Josh finally gave up and drove himself to the hospital, which was very dangerous since he could barely even walk, let alone drive a car. While he hobbled his way into the hospital, Josh wet himself, which he couldn’t control.

The nurses rushed over to him with a wheelchair, he refused because he said he was fine, but the nurses forced him to sit. One of the doctors took some tests and told him that he most likely had a spinal tumor. A spinal tumor must be those giant clusters of cells surrounding me, since they were not there only a few days ago and my friends don’t reproduce like that normally.

One of Josh’s doctor friends tells him it’s most likely because of his job in the radiation therapy lab, and that he has a few choices: to have surgery followed by radiation therapy or chemotherapy. My host decides he’ll start with a surgery and finish with radiation therapy because it will hopefully get rid of the excess tumors after the surgery.

The next time Josh went to the hospital, I remember needles and knifes poking me a couple times then they started taking out chunks of the “tumor” and I started getting less and less squished but, sadly, some of my neighbors got taken with them.

A few weeks pass, Josh has gone to radiation roughly 3 times so far. I have started noticing that more of the over growth of my neighboring cells are getting taken away with every time my host makes a trip to radiation, to the point where there are barely any left. The down side is that my friends, skin cells, are started to die more often and their getting irritated and Josh is always tired. I’m still surprised that Josh ended up with cancer, since only 1,750 men are diagnosed with brain and spinal cord cancer and 1,300 will die from it out of 35.85 people in Canada.

I’ve done some research in the past year, after my host was healed of course, and I figured out that Josh had extramedullary tumors. These type tumors develop outside the spinal cord, such as in the surrounding dura mater (meningioma) or in the nerve roots that extend out from the spinal cord (schwannomas and neurofibromas). These tumors are noncancerous in most cases, and Josh was not most cases I suppose.

Now I am a happy cell again, after the loss of many neighbors and friends. My only wish is that that incident never happens again to anyone, or any host. That is the end of my hosts cancer story.

The making of the cancer story:

Ask:

  • What type of cell does it affect?
  • How many different types of spinal cancer is there?
  • What are the causes of it?
  • What are the symptoms?
  • What are treatment options?
  • What are the statistics?

Acquire:

  • http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/spinal-cord-tumor/home/ovc-20117315
  • http://www.cancercenter.com/spinal-cancer/risk-factors/
  • http://www.cancercenter.com/spinal-cancer/symptoms
  • http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/spinal-cord-tumor/symptoms-causes/dxc-20117316
  • Google

Analyse:

  • I went to multiple sources online, through google.
  • Most of the sites were cancer organizations or hospitals which made it a liable source with lots of information

Asses:

  • I think the project went well
  • I could’ve used more sources and different sites than google, like the ones that Mr. Robinson suggested, to give me more information and citations
  • I think I could’ve added more information about how exactly cancer is formed