My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

And I'm going to work as hard as I can... for cancer research and hopefully maybe we'll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I'd like to think I'm going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year!

With over 3 million women battling breast cancer today everywhere you turn there is a mother daughter sister or friend who has been affected by breast cancer.

Breast cancer is not just a disease that strikes at women. It strikes at the very heart of who we are as women: how others perceive us how we perceive ourselves how we live work and raise our families-or whether we do these things at all.

I have to admit like so many women I always knew there was a chance. But like so many women I never thought it would be me. I never thought I'd hear those devastating words: 'You have breast cancer.'

If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives including mine.

The Teenage Cancer Trust does incredible work supporting and caring for teenagers and young adults with cancer and it's a cause that is really close to me and my family.

Now I'm fighting cancer everybody knows that. People ask me all the time about how you go through your life and how's your day and nothing is changed for me.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate who don't learn to live with it will only destroy what little time they have left.

The cancer doesn't bother me. I have great faith that the technology will beat it.