Not Just Another Day at the Beach

Part #1

1. Define in your own words each of the four terms displayed above in boldface.

a. The four terms are cancer, biopsy, tumor, and malignant melanoma. Cancer is a disease that involves the growth and movement of abnormal cells in certain parts of the body. A biopsy is a medical procedure that is done by removing part of a tissue or organ to examine it and determine if there are any abnormalities with it. A tumor is an abnormal presence of a growth of a certain part of the body, and can either be classified as malignant or benign. Malignant melanoma is the growth of melanocytes, or the different cells that arise from melanocytes.

2. List and briefly describe the stages of cancer.

a. According to cancerinstitute.org, the four stages of cancer are Stage 0, Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, and Stage 4. Stage 0 is when it is “in situ”, which refers to the cancer in the position in which it started. Some cancers never go beyond this early stage. Stage 1 is the localized cancer stage. In this stage cancer cells gain the ability to pass through the “basement membrane”, that is the thin, fibrous boundary in which the cancer began, and to invade neighboring tissue. Stage 2 and Stage 3 are the regional spreading stages. When a cancer cell has invaded, a common next step is for one of its daughter cells to invade through a lymph vessel and back to the blood stream. On the way to the blood stream, the cancer cell can get caught in a lymph node, and there it might provoke an immune response against it. Some other times it divides and forms a lump in the lymph node. This stage is often referred to as regional spread because the cancer has spread within the general region in which it first began but not to other parts of the body. Stage 4 is the stage of distant spreading. This step can be quite varied. Cells from the lump in the lymph node may spread further through lymph vessels to more distant lymph nodes or on into the blood stream. Or cells from the original lump may...