There are certain times of year when my cancer story makes me feel incredibly isolated. There’s the time surrounding April 14, the day I was diagnosed, July 29, the day I was deemed “in remission” and, the one I’ve experienced most recently, the month of October.

We are approaching that bittersweet time of year when we gain an hour of sleep but lose an hour of sunlight. At 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 6, most Americans will set their clocks back one hour as daylight saving time ends.

For every amazing, caring friend, there’s another who has drifted away. The one who wholeheartedly promised, “if you need anything, I’m here,” and wasn’t. There are just some friends, for whatever reason, who won’t be there for you, even if you really want them or need them in your corner.

Rodney Taylor shares the story behind Song for My Father, an expansive oil painting of birch trees that welcomes visitors to the lobby of Roswell Park’s new Scott Bieler Clinical Sciences Center.

As kids grow, their muscles, tendons and ligaments grow as well. So when they complain about aches and pains, it’s often due to the rapid pace of their developing bodies. But if the pain persists, or the pain is coupled with other ailments, it might be something more serious.

FOMO, the abbreviated slang meaning “fear of missing out,” is a huge mental and emotional side effect of being a young adult cancer survivor and represents just a sliver of the unique challenges we have to face during and well after the fight of our lives.

When Dr. Donald Pinkel graduated from medical school at the University of Buffalo in 1951, the world was a pretty dark place for kids with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). They didn’t live long after diagnosis, and experts in the field of blood cancer were convinced the disease was incurable.

If you’re a woman under 40, you’re probably not thinking about menopause. But for young women who have had cancer, treatment-induced ovarian failure – often referred to as “chemopause” – is a very realistic concern.

In 1951, Edwin A. Mirand, PhD, DSc became a permanent employee of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. What would have been impossible to know at the time was just how permanent a fixture he would truly become.