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Actress Alicia Witt Discusses Cancer Treatment After Losing Her Parents, Chef Gordon Ramsay Surprises a Teen With Cancer and More

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From chef Gordon Ramsay sharing a meal with a 13-year-old fan with Ewing sarcoma, to a dermatologist on a playground spotting a mother’s skin cancer, here’s a look at what’s happening in the cancer space this week.

Actress Alicia Witt opens up about starting cancer treatments when her parents died unexpectedly.

Alicia Witt, whose acting credits include the movies “Urban Legend” and “Dune,” as well as the hit show “Orange Is the New Black,” recently posted on social media about her HER2-positive breast cancer treatment — chemotherapy, immunotherapy and mastectomy — which was completed approximately two months ago.

The 46 year old wanted to keep her diagnosis private until treatments were over, and wore a cold cap in an effort to keep her hair. Not going public with her diagnosis was a “much needed part of my healing,” Witt said, noting that at the start of her cancer treatment, she learned of the death of her parents, Robert and Diane Witt, who were found dead in their Worcester, Massachusetts, home last December.

"Our last words to each other were 'I love you,'" she said. "That part was simple; never in doubt. They loved me so. I loved them so,” Witt said, according to People.

Chef Gordon Ramsay surprises a 13-year-old girl with Ewing sarcoma.

Sadie, a 13-year-old with Ewing sarcoma, always wanted to meet chef Gordon Ramsay. Last week, the Children’s Dream Fund, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening illnesses, made that dream a reality.

“When she was diagnosed, she watched him a lot. We’d laugh at some of the stuff that he did. There was a lot of laughter because of that," Sadie’s mom, Misty Dutton, told “TODAY”.

Dutton and the team from the Children’s Dream Fund orchestrated a ruse to fly Sadie from her home state of Florida to Las Vegas to surprise her with a meeting with the chef in his restaurant, Hell’s Kitchen.

After the surprise encounter, the Children’s Dream Fund posted a photo of Sadie and Gordon Ramsay, on which Ramsay commented, “@childrensdreamfund what an amazing young lady and I loved every minute, we faced timed the family in london we Tik Toked but most importantly we had a laugh, what an inspiration, lots of love and thank you for making my day Sadie your bestie new friend Gordon.”

A dermatologist spots a cancerous lesion on a woman at a park.

Melissa Albin, a special education teacher and mother of two, was playing with her children at a park when a woman approached her stating that she was a dermatologist and a mole on Albin’s arm looked like it might be skin cancer.

“She approached me, and she said I am really sorry if this is odd, but I want to let you know I am a dermatologist and I have been looking at that mole on your arm and it’s really alarming to me,” Albin told News4Jax.

Albin got the lesion checked out at the Cleveland Clinic, where a biopsy revealed that it was, indeed, melanoma. Luckily, it was caught early.

“The depth of the mole was less than a millimeter, so if she had waited until it got to a millimeter, her survival from that would have been significantly less,” Dr. Philip Bernard, a doctor who specializes in family medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said.

Canadian motorcycle ride raises nearly $300,000 for prostate cancer research.

For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1,000 motorcyclists participated in the Manitoba Motorcycle Ride for Dad to raise money for prostate cancer research.

The ride, which starts and ends in Winnipeg, raised almost $300,000 this year, and has exceeded $3.1 million in fundraising since its inception 14 years ago.

"There's a lot of men that are dying from prostate cancer that don't even know that they have it, or ... it hasn't been detected early enough,” said Maurice Sabourin, president of the Winnipeg Police Association and president of the Winnipeg Police Association, and co-chair of Ride for Dad.

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