Recently I asked my husband if he would have quit smoking if he knew what lay ahead for him. He told me that while he could logically understand the risk of smoking he wouldn�t have believed that it would ever happen to him�somehow, someway, he was beating the odds and would continue to do so.

I could understand his logic. If you are feeling relatively healthy there is no real reason to believe or focus on the possibility that you are vulnerable to a deadly disease. The body is not sending any warning messages. Why would you take a medication now, on a daily basis for something you don�t have and might not ever get?

I hope that someday researchers develop a test that clearly demonstrates to someone their risk of developing cancer. Individualize the approach to patients! Let them know that cancer is not something that happens to other people- it�s something that will happen to you- no matter how you are feeling today.

If someone had shown my husband the results of a test that showed his risk for developing this cancer as clearly as they did on the day he was told he had cancer, I think his response would have been different.