Tsongas Points to His Candidacy as Example for Cancer Patients

Calling it a “question that has to be addressed,” cancer survivor Paul E. Tsongas urged voters Saturday to treat him as a “full-fledged member of society who has the right to believe that anything is possible.”

Speaking at Macomb Hospital Center, the Democratic presidential candidate called himself living proof that cancer can be beaten.

“I’m whole. I’m a human being, and I can aspire to everything and anything,” he told a group of elderly patients.

“I hope that my race for the White House, my candidacy, would say to every cancer patient everywhere in this country that you can survive. It’s a matter of will and fate. And once you get beyond that, anything is possible.”

Tsongas, 51, has spoken on behalf of cancer victims before, but not in such personal terms, his campaign aides said.

The former U.S. senator from Massachusetts was diagnosed in 1984 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was given two to three years to live. But Tsongas underwent a highly experimental bone marrow transplant and today is free of cancer, his physicians say.

“It wasn’t long ago that people could not utter the word cancer,” Tsongas said Saturday. “Even when I was diagnosed, they would refer to my ‘illness’ or ‘difficulty,’ or ‘my health problem.’ They could not say cancer. Well, cancer is a word. It’s a reality.”

The patients sitting in the hospital’s lobby applauded as Tsongas spoke.