BREAST CANCER NEWS

Thanks to Stanford Hospital--For a review, and for saving my life

2010-08-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

Stanford Hospital Breast Cancer Connections Review of

Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won‘t by Cheryl Swanson, published in 2009, http://www.cherylswanson.net/

     After undergoing treatment for breast cancer, adopting a child from Guatemala, and writing her first suspense novel all at the same time, Swanson decided towrite a book for women fighting breast cancer.

    Through this book she hopes to help women realize that their experiences in fighting cancer can help them to “climb the mountains in their lives.” Swanson not only offers readers her own experiences with cancer, but also provides them with various facts and phone numbers that can help to broaden their knowledge regarding breast cancer.

    Sometimes it can be hard to see the positives in cancer, but this book helps to point them out.

(Excerpted from Stanford Hospital Breast Cancer Connections Review)

Cancer Patient Loses Coverage Over 1 Cent

2010-07-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

It's not the first time someone has lost coverage because they underpaid by a penny. And it likely won't be the last.

Posted by Karen Datko on Thursday, July 8, 2010 2:10 PM

Jobless and undergoing chemotherapy, a Colorado leukemia patient learned that she no longer had health insurance because she underpaid the premium by a penny.

The story of La Rosa Carrington, 52, was relayed by the Colorado Springs Gazette. What's even more remarkable is, this isn't the first time an insurance company or benefits administrator has dropped coverage over a lousy cent.

NEXT UP ON THIS BLOG--HOW TO GET YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY TO PAY YOU FOR HAVING CANCER (Well...almost.)

BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN BREAST CANCER

2010-07-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

A huge congratulations to my fellow winners in the IPPY Living Now...

Gold: Winged Victory: Altered Images: Transcending Breast Cancer, by Art Myers (Photographic Gallery of Fine Art Books)

Silver (tie): Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won’t, by Cheryl Swanson (Zumaya Publications LLC) and Redeeming Our Treasures: Finding Joy in the Shadows of an Abusive Past, by Linda Settles, M.A. (Edict House Publishing)

Bronze: Back to Life After a Heart Crisis: Rebuild Your Courage & Feel Strong Again, by Marc Wallack, M.D. and Jamie Colby (Avery Books)

More info at: http://www.cherylswanson.net/ and http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1357

BUSTING LOOSE WINS IPPY

2010-07-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to announce that my breast cancer survivor's guide won the Living Now silver medal 2010. Congratulations to fellow winners and more information at: http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1290

WIN A COPY OF BUSTING LOOSE!

2010-03-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

Aloha friends!

To celebrate the Hawaiian launch of Busting Loose, Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't, we're giving away free copies. Send an email with name, address and your connection to breast cancer to this address: bobz_publishing@ live.com. (Only United States addresses please!)

And if you're traveling in Hawaii this month, Cheryl Swanson will be appearing at multiple events, including a Borders, Kauai book-signing on May 1 at 2:00 pm. Check back for more details.

Link Found Between Stress and Breast Cancer

2010-03-03T21:14:00.000-08:00

There are mulitple studies (just out in the past week) linking breast cancer recurrence and stress. I'm excerpting a section of Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't that deals directly with stress. If you're stressed right now, go take a walk! Then come back and read.

Finding a new way to handle stress might save your life.

Tame Career and Personal Stress

Life is not a stress rehearsal.
-Anonymous

If we don’t want to know something bad enough, we never let the thought reach our conscious awareness. Every doctor who works with cancer patients has seen patients ignore symptoms that should have seriously alarmed them. It’s too easy to blame this on ignorance. The truth is, it’s rarely ignorance. Instead, the problem goes much deeper.

Nobody comes to breast cancer as a blank slate. The first time I married I did it in four months—from first date to altar. Looking back, I have no idea why I married whom I did. I’d like to blame it on love, but the cause was simpler and possibly more common—plain, unadulterated stupidity.

I sought counseling; I read books; I went to workshops. I even allowed myself to be deprogrammed by an ex-CIA agent who was an expert on brain-washing. Like a lot of women married to men with whom they have nothing in common, I actually thought all this effort was getting me somewhere. And then came year ten, when my frog-who-never-turned-into-a- prince hopped away. To swim in another pond with a much younger and prettier amphibian.

I was never so relieved in my life.

A year after that, I began making my living as a professional speaker. Standing at the podium in my “power suit,” I’d pour out the adrenalin. This was huge, a big change for me. Essentially shy, I found I could do something that would give most everyone I knew anxiety attacks. I couldn’t have made the transformation if I’d still been married—I wouldn’t have given myself the psychic space to change, much less the opportunity for the non-stop international travel required to build a reputation.

Even as a single woman, the work was difficult—filled with migraines, jet-lag, sleepless nights in sterile hotel rooms. In the beginning, I spoke on marketing and patient care and my audiences were mostly comprised of dentists. Dentists are generally good natured, but eventually I also started doing presentations to groups of physicians. If you make a mistake in front of a group of physicians—with their incredible perspicacity and egos—be prepared to be turned into a vomiting wretch (while of course remaining completely nonchalant on the surface.)

As all public speakers soon realize, everything is your fault when you are the one behind the microphone. When the equipment malfunctions through no fault of your own, it’s still your fault. I once spoke at Cornell University’s North Shore Medical Hospital to approximately 100 doctors for an entire afternoon in pitch darkness. A brown-out in city’s main power grid was the cause, but it was still all my fault.

Even when all the equipment works and you’re on your toes mentally, you’re under constant stress. When you’re on the speaking circuit, everything is an occasion for public disgrace. And if you’re not where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there, it’s also an occasion for great financial loss. (Don’t get me started on plane delays when you owe the organizer $15,000 if you don’t show up on time for the gig.)

If your plane actually arrives on schedule, the next morning you’ll still be doing your hair and make-up out of a suitcase you were too tired to unpack the night before. The next day will start with a cab or limo in pitch darkness to the hospital, medical college or conventional hall, where you stand on your feet all day, thinking: I have to pee, I have to pee…

My speaking gigs often went well. I speak from my heart and usually feel as if I make some kind of connection with my audience. But I was always overbooked and looking back, I believe the only reason I persisted was that I was like many of the women of my generation—addicted to living in the eye of a hurricane. I operated on two basic emotions in those days—panic and barely suppressed panic. I stayed unbelievably busy so I wouldn’t realize I was unbelievably overwhelmed.

Most women get their cancer diagnosis in their forties and fifties and by that time we have come to believe they’re stronger than any problem. What most of us don’t understand is that our brains are swamped and our bodies are tired, our blood pressure is up, our serotonin levels are down, our nerves are shot and our core is saggy. In fact, we are in the worst condition of our lives.

It amazes me sometimes that women like me survive, but I did, and we do, and then comes cancer. With no warning, we step out of the eye and into the actual hurricane. I can handle this easily; I’ve handled worse, we think.

How wrong we are. If we were honest, we would admit that we’re already facing challenges that are more than we can actually bear.

Millions of women around the globe go through life this way and just about as many men. We automatically conceal our distress no matter what is happening to us. Disoriented and lost, we keep moving, never asking if we’re going in the wrong direction. Internally, we are coming apart, but we are too stubborn to admit anything is wrong even to ourselves. We know what we’re doing is killing us inside, but pride stands in the way.

The illusion of personal power over a situation in which you are powerless will damage you much worse than anything that is actually in the situation. Cancer makes us accept that there are limits to our power. What a gift that is! That realization alone makes not just the disease but everything in life much easier to handle.

Once we start telling ourselves the truth, it’s like a light is turned on, our whole lives are illuminated and we can get at the root of the problem. We can begin to hash out who we are and what we actually want and what matters to us most.

Over and over, women told me the trauma of the disease became an empowering turning point for them. They felt it helped them spur themselves to new ambitions, new careers and new loves.

It’s never easy, because cancer is a genuine hurricane. The disease seizes us and pulls us where we never wanted to go, while we look in vain for safety ropes. We cling to each other, we cling to ourselves, we cling to whatever comes hurtling out of the darkness until finally, there’s nothing left to cling to.

Willfully and passionately we may disagree, and insist we aren’t hostage to family history, that we are the masters of our fates. But we’ll see who blinks. We can parody safety, the perfect family, the perfect marriage, the perfect career, but we’re teetering on the edge.

Excerpted from Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't, from Zumaya Publications,

Busting Loose on Must-Have List for Breast Cancer Patients

2010-01-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.this-is-great.com/top/xrexjxixnxaxhxhxmxaxjxsxcxs?PHPSESSID=924211c1022b42f843ca12683bf1b4b9

Not sure I agree with this list...but nice to see Busting Loose is listed. If you're a reviewer, let me know at cherylaswanson@gmail.com. Free copies are available for review from the publisher.

Recent Review of Busting Loose--reprinted with permission

2010-01-16T18:35:00.000-08:00

Busting Loose Hit Me Like a Bombshell
by Jane Phillipshttp://www.booksunlimited.ie/Books/Swanson-Cheryl/Busting-Loose/9781934841747.htm

Most helpful book I read on breast cancer, bar none. When I was diagnosed, so many things did not make sense—until I read this book. They now make sense

Briefly, in addition to cancer, you have to deal with an information overload that is unbelievable. You have to sift through that information and make huge decisions, decisions that could radically change your future and even save your life. And you can’t give the responsibility up to your doctors—not unless you really don’t care if you keep your breasts, or even keep on living. Deep down, I was completely terrified and at a loss how to help myself. I virtually gave up because my doctors didn’t seem to care.

The book showed me how to take control, get answers to my questions, force the hospital to schedule tests and surgery rapidly. (I even browbeat my insurers into paying for a procedure they had refused to cover! Yes!) There are eighty chapters in this book. It doesn’t cover just medical information, but family relationships, work problems, diet, sex—all the things breast cancer can effect.

Some of the chapters in Busting Loose I felt I could have written because they were so close to my experience. The book tells the story of the author’s battle not to let cancer become a roadblock. In her case, she went right ahead with her dreams, adopting a little girl from Guatemala and becoming a suspense novelist. My life is very different, but I could relate and her wisdom fit my situation just as well. You want inspiration, you’ll find it here. I recommend this to all women recently diagnoses, as well as any survivor interested in staying healthy. You’re going to find information you will not read anywhere else.

Nothing Wrong with Nuts...Telling Your Parents You Have Breast Cancer

2010-01-03T22:34:00.000-08:00

Excerpted from Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family—in another city. -George Burns

My father was a WWII Navy veteran, born in Toledo, Ohio. After the war, the GI bill sent him to college and he trained as an electrical engineer. My mother was a farm girl from Maumee, Ohio who came from a family of ten children.

Intelligent, insightful, empathetic conversation around the dinner table was not part of the deal in my childhood. Nor were compliments on anyone’s appearance or high I.Q. The deal was—safety, security and structure and eating the food mom prepared as fast as possible, before it got cold.

I was a heavy-duty reader as a child and spent a lot of time imagining I was in the brooding, haunting Wuthering Heights or living the life of the melancholy, triumphant Jane Eyre. Because I was so in touch with fantasy, I quickly learned to fantasize my life, as well as my family. We remained in California for my entire childhood however, and because I was so in touch with fantasy, it was easy enough for me to start fantasizing my family. My down-to-earth parents became better than they were—to the point that I often gushed to my friends about how wonderful they were and how they supported and understood me.

A good friend pointed out the discrepancy, many, many years later. Concerned about where this was leading me, she told me that my parents weren’t the perfect people I kept insisting they were. It was like a bell went off. DING!

She also pointed out that I was secretly angry with my family and my insistence on their perfection kept reinforcing that anger. Like many adult children I had refused to acknowledge who my parents really were and then I got upset when they didn’t give me what I expected from them. I needed to align my expectations with my actual family and not my fantasies of my family. Especially since I wasn’t the Angel in the House as a child, to say the least, and may my parents forgive me.

When parents hear about an adult child’s cancer, they’re devastated. Many are already wondering how many autumns they have left, and now they have to deal with the fact their child may not have that many either. Besides, why is their child seriously ill, instead of them? (It’s not supposed to happen that way.) And if their child dies before them, who is going to help them when their time comes? Because it is so unexpected, few, very few, parents are able to support their adult child in the way he or she needs to be supported. Instead, they usually collapse. That’s why it’s often said that when an individual gets cancer, their whole family gets cancer.

I lost a parent during my cancer experience, my father-in-law, a man I treasured deeply. Compellingly alive in the midst of his own end-of-life experience, he was an anchor to me. He died, I lived, but he helped me to understand that dying can be a time of learning and growth. A time of deepening our love, our awareness of what is important in life and our commitment to spiritual beliefs and practices. Death can even be an opportunity to gain insight into the true nature of ourselves and all things, an insight that will enable us to become free from all suffering.

I also had to deal with a family relationship that was basically destructive. All of us have those relationships, whether we recognize them or not. Some member of our extended family—be it aunt, uncle, younger sister, grown-up stepchild or distant cousin—has always done their damnedest to upset us. And because they are family, they know exactly how to do it.

After cancer, all relationships change—rapidly, radically. Once the disease strikes, we must protect ourselves emotionally; or die. Empty, meaningless or destructive relationships are a menace, because they steal the energy required to fight the disease. Those destructive relationships have always been toxic; now they become lethal. It’s time to bail.

Even with a profoundly normal family, breast cancer changes our obligations. It teaches us to shake free of our caretaker compulsions, because we simply can’t carry other people’s burdens anymore. Our most important job has become taking care of ourselves.

A large segment of the general population believes that being constantly upbeat and positive is the best way to cope with cancer. (If you don’t agree, think of all the relentlessly positive survivor stories in the popular magazines.) But unvarnished optimism denies cancer patients the opportunity to confront their real fears. We need to ask: best for whom? What is best for the individual will depend totally on the individual and vary wildly. What is best for the family is obviously to be as little reminded of the cancer patient’s emotional pain as possible.

A truly saintly cancer patient would put on a brave front for the family’s sake. But saintliness is not a requirement for cancer patients. We have as much right to express ourselves as anyone else. Too much talk about what’s an admirable response and not enough about what helps us cope with their situation is a selfish response by society.

The reality is that cancer brings out not only our own fears, but the fears of our life partner, children, siblings and parents. It’s a huge heap of fear and we won’t be able to sort it out for a long time. Without meaning to, other family members vent on us their anguish and terror. Without thinking, they demand comfort from us, at the very time we need it from them.

And we try to help them, because society and family conditioning has taught to put ourselves last. Women in our society are the caregivers. Time and again, women told me that when they received a cancer diagnosis, the first thing they worried about was how much it will wound family and friends to hear it. At the very time they should be giving care and concern to themselves, they were feeling guilty, worrying how their diagnosis would hurt others.

It does hurt them, of course. It’s incredibly painful to hear that a loved one has cancer. And, over and over again, our family and friends react to the hurt by hurting us in return. If we fear a bad reaction from any member of your family, it’s best to shield ourselves. We can let someone else break the news. Our loved one’s grief might tear to pieces what is left of our composure.

Later, after they’ve calmed down, we can tell our family how we want them to respond. We can ask them not to cry in front of us. We can tell them not to serve up verbal gloom and doom, but to bring over dinner occasionally instead. We can tell them not to damage our self-esteem by remarking on changes in our appearance. We can carefully describe their role: comforting, advising, reassuring and running an occasional errand. And we can describe what is NOT their role: being paranoid, tearful or anxious.

A lot of things are now more important than keeping our family content, so we must balance our own needs against theirs for a change. After all, we’re the one holding the higher card.

New Drug offers Help for Resistant Breast Cancers

2009-12-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

tumors http://www.webmd.com/breast-cancer/news/20091215/targeted-breast-cancer-drug-shrinks-tumorsDec. 15, 2009 (San Antonio) -- A new targeted cancer drug has been shown to shrink tumors in women with metastatic breast cancer after an average of seven other drugs, including Herceptin, failed.

The new drug, called T-DM1, combines Herceptin with a potent chemotherapy drug. It's a Trojan horse approach, where Herceptin homes in on cancer cells and delivers the cancer-killing agent directly to its target.

The women remained cancer-free for an average of seven months -- results unheard of in patients this sick, he says.

All the women, who had breast tumors for an average of three years, had cancer that had metastasized, or spread to other parts of the body. They had been treated with an average of seven different therapies, including Herceptin, Tykerb, and Xeloda, and each had failed.

Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't offers information on new treatments for breast cancer, as well as inspiring guidance for survivors.

MALE BREAST CANCER

2009-12-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from Busting Loose)

With Breast Cancer, Macho Doesn't Mean Mucho

This year in America, fourteen hundred men will hear they have breast cancer. All of them will be shocked and dumbfounded. And some of them will die. -Ted Allen, Esquire magazine, June, 2000

Close to one percent of all breast cancer patients are men. There is a persistent myth that male breast cancer is more serious then female breast cancer, but that is not the case. Male breast cancer has a worse prognosis only because the disease is usually diagnosed at a later stage.

Male breast cancer tends to be diagnosed later because doctors are less familiar with the disease in men. In addition, the man himself often ignores the lump—unaware he is at risk of breast cancer. Sometimes, very tragically, even specialists flat-out ignore the problem.

Dave Lyons is a male breast cancer survivor. Dave discovered his breast lump when it was still quite small. Over the next eight years he made appointments to see four different doctors. None of them took him seriously. After eight years, pain came into the picture. Dave’s lump ached, his chest ached, and his arm ached. Sometimes the pain brought tears to his eyes. “The only pain I can think of that comes even close,” he recalls, “is getting hit in the testicles.”

Recovering male breast cancer patients often say the deadly silence about the disease among men kept them from seeking help earlier. The rarity of male breast cancer, combined with a reluctance to talk by many who have had it, keeps the disease under wraps. This could be a testosterone problem, according to breast cancer survivor, Galen, who owns a used-bookstore in Colorado. “Men have this thing, like, ‘We’re too strong to get breast cancer.’” Galen often alerts male customers to the danger they might be facing. “I get a lot of men in my store, who come to Boulder for the hiking and rock-climbing. If the conversation gets around to where I can get a word in, I tell ‘em I’m a breast cancer survivor. Their eyes get big and they say: ‘What do you mean? Men can’t get breast cancer!’”

The risk factors for male breast cancer are the same as for female breast cancer. For example, there is an increased risk for men of Jewish heritage, or who have a family history that includes genetic mutations associated with breast cancer.

If you have a husband, son or father with a lump in his chest, tell him to get it checked out. Fortunately, doctors are more aware of male breast cancer these days then they were when Dave Lyons spent eight years trying to find a doctor who would take him seriously.

The mother of a neighbor of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer this past summer. The mother’s diagnosis led to her husband going in for a check-up of a troubling lump, where he was also diagnosed with breast cancer. It may seem like unbelievably bad luck, but there were compensations. For one thing, husband and wife both had their cancers detected early. For another, as the daughter said to me (only half-joking): “The two of them are their own support group.”

Breast cancer is not a woman’s disease; it is a human disease. Old or young, black or white, gay or straight, poor or rich, married or un-, female or male—none of us are immune.

Buy Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't
from Amazon, your local bookstore or from author's site (http://www.cherylswanson.net/)

New Mammogram Guidelines--Right or Wrong?

2009-11-30T20:02:00.000-08:00

Addressing the Mammogram Controvery
Who ever thought up the word, “Mammogram?” Every time I hear it, I think I’m supposed to put my breast in an envelope and mail it somewhere. -Jasmine, breast cancer survivor

The flap over the new guidelines for mammograms point up a peculiar danger American women face with mammograms. We risk succumbing to the notion getting regular mammograms somehow prevents breast cancer. “There’s almost, I think, a magical belief that getting regular mammography may prevent breast cancer. This is something I’ve experienced myself as a patient,” said Dr. Susan Bennett, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. “Sort of this ‘clean-bill-of-health’ concept that it (a mammogram) will give you a sort of ‘inoculation’ against the disease.”

When a respected doctor ‘fesses up’ like this, it’s time to start rethinking the purpose of mammographic screening. I don't agree with the new guidelines that most women don't need them until they reach fifty. Even women at low risk of breast cancer should have the protection of adequate screening in their forties. But we need to realize that not only do mammograms not prevent cancer, mammograms completely miss 15 to 25 percent of breast cancer. And 80 percent of what looks suspicious on a mammogram turns out not to be cancer, according to the 2005 American Cancer Society Report.

Mammograms are particularly ineffective when women have dense breasts. A mammogram depicts dense tissue as white, so a dense breast will produce a predominantly white mammogram. Breast masses are also white. Picking out a small white spot (which may be cancerous) against a predominantly white background is like finding a snowball in a blizzard. The inability to identify cancerous masses in dense tissue is what makes mammograms so notoriously inaccurate on younger women.

Breast cancer is not a textbook cancer, where indications are clearly given and treatments are well agreed upon. A woman can think she doesn’t have breast cancer because she’s not fully informed about all the possible warning signs of breast cancer. She may have a symptom that usually signals a benign situation, but in her case it signals a problem.

There is strong evidence that routine mammography for women in their 50s and older reduces the breast cancer death rate, but the benefit of screening women in their 40s remains a subject of intense medical dispute. Recently the National Cancer Institute stopped advising routine mammograms for women under 50, however the American Cancer Society advises women to receive screenings in their 40’s. Outside the United States (in Canada and most European countries), yearly mammograms are generally recommended only for women above the age of fifty.

There are things we can all do to get the best out of mammograms—however imperfect they are as a screening method. Try to go to the same facility every year. If you can’t, make sure the new facility has copies of your old mammograms. Doing so will help avoid false positives and make it easier for changes in your breast tissue to be quickly detected.

In addition, insist on getting the results of the mammogram in writing. Most facilities will mail a report, but don’t assume everything was okay if you don’t receive one. Contact the facility and request the report be mailed.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of relying strictly on mammograms. Be sure to get a yearly clinical breast exam and keep alert to any changes in appearance or feeling in your breasts. Mammograms save lives, but if a breast lump is felt, a negative mammogram is meaningless. The woman can still have breast cancer.

Excerpted from BUSTING LOOSE: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't, by Cheryl Swanson, Published by Zumaya Publications.

Nothing Wrong with Nuts--From Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

2009-11-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.cherylswanson.net/

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family—in another city. -George Burns

I came from a profoundly normal family. My father was a WWII Navy veteran from Toledo, Ohio. After the war, the GI bill sent him to college and he trained as an electrical engineer. My mother was a farm girl from Maumee, Ohio who came from a family of ten children.

Intelligent, insightful, empathetic conversation around the dinner table was not part of the deal in my childhood. Nor were compliments on anyone’s appearance or high I.Q. The deal was—safety, security and structure and eating the food mom prepared as fast as possible, before it got cold.

I was a heavy-duty reader as a child and spent a lot of time imagining I was in the brooding, haunting Wuthering Heights or living the life of the melancholy, triumphant Jane Eyre. Because I was so in touch with fantasy, I quickly learned to fantasize my life, as well as my family. We remained in California for my entire childhood however, and because I was so in touch with fantasy, it was easy enough for me to start fantasizing my family. My down-to-earth parents became better than they were—to the point that I often gushed to my friends about how wonderful they were and how they supported and understood me.

A good friend pointed out the discrepancy, many, many years later. Concerned about where this was leading me, she told me that my parents weren’t the perfect people I kept insisting they were. It was like a bell went off. DING!

She also pointed out that I was secretly angry with my family and my insistence on their perfection kept reinforcing that anger. Like many adult children I had refused to acknowledge who my parents really were and then I got upset when they didn’t give me what I expected from them. I needed to align my expectations with my actual family and not my fantasies of my family. Especially since I wasn’t the Angel in the House as a child, to say the least, and may my parents forgive me.

When parents hear about an adult child’s cancer, they’re devastated. Many are already wondering how many autumns they have left, and now they have to deal with the fact their child may not have that many either. Besides, why is their child seriously ill, instead of them? (It’s not supposed to happen that way.) And if their child dies before them, who is going to help them when their time comes? Because it is so unexpected, few, very few, parents are able to support their adult child in the way he or she needs to be supported. Instead, they usually collapse. That’s why it’s often said that when an individual gets cancer, their whole family gets cancer.

I lost a parent during my cancer experience, my father-in-law, a man I treasured deeply. Compellingly alive in the midst of his own end-of-life experience, he was an anchor to me. He died, I lived, but he helped me to understand that dying can be a time of learning and growth. A time of deepening our love, our awareness of what is important in life and our commitment to spiritual beliefs and practices. Death can even be an opportunity to gain insight into the true nature of ourselves and all things, an insight that will enable us to become free from all suffering.

I also had to deal with a family relationship that was basically destructive. All of us have those relationships, whether we recognize them or not. Some member of our extended family—be it aunt, uncle, younger sister, grown-up stepchild or distant cousin—has always done their damnedest to upset us. And because they are family, they know exactly how to do it.

After cancer, all relationships change—rapidly, radically. Once the disease strikes, we must protect ourselves emotionally; or die. Empty, meaningless or destructive relationships are a menace, because they steal the energy required to fight the disease. Those destructive relationships have always been toxic; now they become lethal. It’s time to bail.

Even with a profoundly normal family, breast cancer changes our obligations. It teaches us to shake free of our caretaker compulsions, because we simply can’t carry other people’s burdens anymore. Our most important job has become taking care of ourselves.

A large segment of the general population believes that being constantly upbeat and positive is the best way to cope with cancer. (If you don’t agree, think of all the relentlessly positive survivor stories in the popular magazines.) But unvarnished optimism denies cancer patients the opportunity to confront their real fears. We need to ask: best for whom? What is best for the individual will depend totally on the individual and vary wildly. What is best for the family is obviously to be as little reminded of the cancer patient’s emotional pain as possible.

A truly saintly cancer patient would put on a brave front for the family’s sake. But saintliness is not a requirement for cancer patients. We have as much right to express ourselves as anyone else. Too much talk about what’s an admirable response and not enough about what helps us cope with their situation is a selfish response by society.

The reality is that cancer brings out not only our own fears, but the fears of our life partner, children, siblings and parents. It’s a huge heap of fear and we won’t be able to sort it out for a long time. Without meaning to, other family members vent on us their anguish and terror. Without thinking, they demand comfort from us, at the very time we need it from them.

And we try to help them, because society and family conditioning has taught to put ourselves last. Women in our society are the caregivers. Time and again, women told me that when they received a cancer diagnosis, the first thing they worried about was how much it will wound family and friends to hear it. At the very time they should be giving care and concern to themselves, they were feeling guilty, worrying how their diagnosis would hurt others.

It does hurt them, of course. It’s incredibly painful to hear that a loved one has cancer. And, over and over again, our family and friends react to the hurt by hurting us in return. If we fear a bad reaction from any member of your family, it’s best to shield ourselves. We can let someone else break the news. Our loved one’s grief might tear to pieces what is left of our composure.

Later, after they’ve calmed down, we can tell our family how we want them to respond. We can ask them not to cry in front of us. We can tell them not to serve up verbal gloom and doom, but to bring over dinner occasionally instead. We can tell them not to damage our self-esteem by remarking on changes in our appearance. We can carefully describe their role: comforting, advising, reassuring and running an occasional errand. And we can describe what is NOT their role: being paranoid, tearful or anxious.

A lot of things are now more important than keeping our family content, so we must balance our own needs against theirs for a change. After all, we’re the one holding the higher card.

Breast Cancer's Wild Women and Bad Girls

2009-11-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

She smiled, or I never would have met her.

She wasn’t smiling at me; she was smiling at her own wit in the pages of an article she was editing. The woman had great cheekbones and nice features ruled by huge blue eyes. In spite of what chemotherapy had done to her appearance, she looked younger than forty-two.

I said hello and knelt to pet the golden Labrador retriever dozing at her feet. I’d just finished a follow-up appointment and my rumbling stomach had sent me to a San Francisco dockside café. The tables were crowded with investment bankers and tech-heads discussing how to make a million bucks that afternoon. There were also a few patients undergoing cancer treatment at the nearby hospital—including Julia, who I soon found out was also a writer.

I didn’t plan to sit with Julia, partly because I am shy and partly because she was sitting in direct sunlight. Like me, her head wasn’t covered and I could almost smell the UV rays sizzling off her bald skull.

“Chemo is a bitch, isn’t it,” she said casually, as I stroked the Lab’s velvety head.

I’m not sitting with you, I thought. I’ll find a table in the shade.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” She smiled a private smile.

“What feels good?” As if magnetized, my fingers kept rumpling the Lab’s soft fur.

Her smile got broader. “Hair.”

The Lab’s name was Riddles. Riddles’ owner snapped shut her writing notebook and asked me to join her. And I did, although you are never supposed to sit in the sun, no matter how good it feels, not in the middle of chemotherapy. Not only does chemotherapy treatment make the skin photo-sensitive, but if you’ve recently lost your hair, you’re exposing skin that hasn’t seen the light of day since you were a baby. And I had just lost my long hair—most of it literally blowing off my skull one day when I went outside, and the rest of it shaved off two days later.

But this was Julia and Julia did that to people. When you were with Julia, the rules didn’t apply. So I sat down with her and ordered pastrami on rye. We chatted about my novel and her series of articles on her father, who had been a southern poet of some note.

I ran into Julia several times after that. It wasn’t long before I found out that she was in a marriage that was more toxic than any chemotherapy. Her husband had reacted to her cancer by telling her that her she looked like a freak and her appearance disgusted him. When she burst into tears, he told her she might as well get it over with and die.

“No matter what, I’m going to live long enough to divorce that bastard,” she told me. “He’s been cheating on me because he thinks I’m helpless, going through chemotherapy. He’ll change his mind when my lawyer gets done with him.”

Starting divorce proceedings in the midst of chemotherapy is hardly an action a therapist would recommend. But I couldn’t help but notice that Julia found it liberating. She was the type of person who was not afraid to go into the darkness alone.

One thing I learned from during my treatment is that cancer makes good marriages better and bad marriages worse. I also learned there are lots of ways women empower themselves to get through the ordeal of cancer treatment. Humor works and so does faith and optimism.

So does consulting the dark side of ourselves.

I don’t mean turning into an avant-garde version of a character in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. I don’t mean becoming a madwoman, getting into a fistfight with a saleslady, or staring down at the bottom of a whisky glass with cigarette smoke swirling. I don’t mean overeating for months, or dumping our work on someone else.

I mean not being afraid to walk away from someone who is brutal to us—even if that someone is our spouse. I mean valuing our own dignity and insisting that others not treat us cruelly.

Let’s be honest. Implicit in society’s definition of us as a “breast cancer victim” is the concept that we can be easily controlled. Breast cancer patients are sick, weak, vulnerable, and powerless—so the world thinks. At the hospital we’re expected to be passive and dependent “good patients,” who don’t rock the boat.

Dealing with the “cancer patient” stereotype can subvert a survivor’s attempt to conquer their illness. It can also give a woman who is struggling to get through a devastating illness a feeling of relentless, inevitable doom. Learning to release anger on the other hand can have great rehabilitation benefits. Righteous anger in the midst of cancer brings a great, wild joy at being alive.

What Julia taught me was that retaining our life in the midst of a crisis requires the ability to be dark, rebellious and full of “bad thoughts.” We have to give free rein to our self-protective instincts—no matter where they lead us. And even if those instincts, frankly, terrify us.

Julia’s husband refused to end his affair and he continued to abuse her. It took her almost two years, but Julia finally divorced him. Her chemotherapy infusions were useful to her, not just in curing her disease, but on an emotional level. Toxic material siphoned into her veins became toxic anger she funneled into liberating herself.

Julia’s marriage and cancer treatment ended about the same time and she’s made a good recovery from both. These days, she’s out there taking risks, enjoying being a “bad girl,” not sitting around the house ironing her husband’s shirts so he can look good when he sneaks around with other women.

“You can’t have everything,” she told me recently, with a wicked laugh. “But you can try. Oh, you can try.” And so Julia tries. And so should we all.

Julia is the wild woman of breast cancer and her numbers are legion. Like Julia, these women have something important and simple to teach us. Allow access to all parts of yourself—all the animals within, from lioness to lamb. Be all you need to be to survive. Be good, because that makes you happy. Be strong, because you life is just beginning, not ending. And don’t be afraid of your dark side. Because sometimes, it’s oh so good to be bad.

(Excerpt from BUSTING LOOSE: Breast Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

Tell Us How You Really Feel about Your Oncologist

2009-11-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

Uh huh

Sistuh

The wheel's spinning, but the hamster's dead.

A few feathers short of a whole duck.

All foam, no beer.

The cheese slid off his cracker.

brains by Mattel.

Couldn't pour water out of a boot with

instructions on the heel.

Chimney's clogged.

Elevator doesn't go all the way to the top Floor.

Her sewing machine's out of thread.

His antenna doesn't pick up all the channels.

His belt doesn't go through all the loops.

Missing a few buttons on his remote control.

No grain in the silo.

Proof that evolution CAN go in reverse.

Receiver is off the hook.

Several nuts short of a full pouch.

Skylight leaks a little.

Slinky's kinked.

Surfing in Nebraska.

Too much yardage between the goal posts.

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

The lights are on, but nobody's home.

24 cents short of a quarter.

Don't get me wrong, I had some fantastic doctors. But...all those who have been there know what I mean. Don't ya, Sistuh?

Suzanne Somers--Is She Right?

2009-11-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

http://tinyurl.com/ykfx5rkI've had some questions about my opinion of Suzanne Somers' latest book.

Suzanne is worth listening to, if only because she's gutsy, feisty and follows her own pathway. (Remember when she walked off Three's Company?) Beyond that, as a breast cancer survivor with a strong interest in cancer and cancer treatments, I believe there is a place for alternative treatment. Current conventional treatments (chemo, radiation, surgery, hormone blockers) are devastating to a woman physically, emotionally and hormonally. The goal of all current treatment is to destroy the cancer, (which also damages the woman herself) not to strenghten the women's natural immune system to fight the disease.

Still...while Suzane readily admits in her book that her approach to health is not something she advocates for everyone, the alternative methods she cites in her latest book are very risky for beginning stage breast cancer patients. Through my own research I discovered that most women are cured through conventional medical treatments these days, horrible as those treatments may seem. Unfortunately, alternative treatments have no such track record. Women who use alternative treatment instead of conventional therapy need to realize that they may be risking their lives unnecessarily.

In fact, the removal of the cancer through surgery all by itself will (most likely) cure most beginning stage breast cancers. (Suzanne herself had that initial surgery.) Additional treatment such as chemo, radiation and hormone blockers are prescribed to up the odds that the cancer does not recur years and even decades later. Suzanne may still be writing books about how to avoid conventional cancer treatment decades from now. But she also may be paying a terrible price for forgoing those treatments. It concerns me that those who read her book and don't investigate further might join her.

On the other hand, she does a huge service to all cancer patients through her interviews with alternative care doctors and medical personnel. If one of those alternative treatments proves out, her book will be instrumental in getting them the notice of the public and the general research community. In addition, alternative treatment has a huge role in reducing pain and stress, in several ways I mentioned in my latest book. More on Suzanne later...

Breast Cancer Tip 2: How to Find a Good Breast Surgeon

2009-11-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from BUSTING LOOSE: BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS TELL YOU WHAT YOUR DOCTOR WON'T
Just because your doctor has a name for your condition doesn’t mean he or she knows what it is. -Unknown

Whatever we do, we shouldn’t ignore worrisome signals of possible breast cancer, because we can’t find a good doctor. They’re out there; they just have to be located.

Many women panic when they notice a new breast lump or other troubling symptom because they have no idea where to find a breast surgeon. Don’t worry; no breast surgeon is needed—not at this point. In fact, don’t even try to find a breast surgeon. Instead, make an immediate appointment with a gynecologist. Failing that, go see your family physician. Report your symptoms to your family doctor’s office and insist on getting an appointment within a day or so, because no one wants to live with the anxiety.

A gynecologist or family physician can provide advice on whether further evaluation is needed. Cancerous breast lumps are often (not always) quite distinctive. Trained practitioners can usually tell with their fingers whether the patient needs a follow-up emergency appointment with a breast surgeon. If so, ask them to call and make that emergency appointment for you, before you leave their office.

Breast surgeons give first priority to requests from other specialists and physicians, so another doctor will be able to get an appointment with even the busiest surgeon within a few days. And don’t be surprised if the doctor you are referred to is not a “breast surgeon,” but a general surgeon. There is actually no board certification for “breast surgery.” Instead, all surgeons performing breast surgery are board certified in general surgery. Usually these surgeons refer to themselves as “breast surgeons,” but some, equally qualified, refer to themselves as general surgeons, with a special emphasis in breast surgery, both benign and cancerous.

It seems shocking, but physicians these days tend to be brutally frank about breast cancer. It is typical for doctors to tell a women immediately if they suspect she has cancer. In part doctors do this because full disclosure is the best way to avoid malpractice lawsuits. But doctors have also found that many women will not seek further evaluation otherwise.

When a doctor doesn’t believe the woman has cancer, he or she may still advise further evaluation or tests. Those tests should be done as soon as possible. The more information available, the faster and easier it will be to rule out the disease.

What should a woman do if her physician tells her not to worry, but she feels the breast exam was hurried? What if she thinks about it later and can’t get peace in spite of a benign evaluation?

It’s best never to ignore your intuition. Instead, go another step up the ladder; schedule a follow-up appointment yourself with a breast surgeon. It’s unlikely that you will be able to get this appointment quickly, but a few weeks delay at this point will not compromise your treatment.

A Negative Mammogram is Meaningless

2009-11-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Who ever thought up the word, “Mammogram?” Every time I hear it, I think I’m supposed to put my breast in an envelope and mail it somewhere. -Jasmine, breast cancer survivor

American women face a peculiar danger with mammograms. We risk succumbing to the notion getting regular mammograms somehow prevents breast cancer. “There’s almost, I think, a magical belief that getting regular mammography may prevent breast cancer. This is something I’ve experienced myself as a patient,” said Dr. Susan Bennett, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. “Sort of this ‘clean-bill-of-health’ concept that it (a mammogram) will give you a sort of ‘inoculation’ against the disease.”

When a respected doctor ‘fesses up’ like this, it’s time to start rethinking the purpose of mammographic screening. Not only do mammograms not prevent cancer, mammograms completely miss 15 to 25 percent of breast cancer. And 80 percent of what looks suspicious on a mammogram turns out not to be cancer, according to the 2005 American Cancer Society Report.

Mammograms are particularly ineffective when women have dense breasts. A mammogram depicts dense tissue as white, so a dense breast will produce a predominantly white mammogram. Breast masses are also white. Picking out a small white spot (which may be cancerous) against a predominantly white background is like finding a snowball in a blizzard. The inability to identify cancerous masses in dense tissue is what makes mammograms so notoriously inaccurate on younger women.

Breast cancer is not a textbook cancer, where indications are clearly given and treatments are well agreed upon. A woman can think she doesn’t have breast cancer because she’s not fully informed about all the possible warning signs of breast cancer. She may have a symptom that usually signals a benign situation, but in her case it signals a problem.

There is strong evidence that routine mammography for women in their 50s and older reduces the breast cancer death rate, but the benefit of screening women in their 40s remains a subject of intense medical dispute. Recently the National Cancer Institute stopped advising routine mammograms for women under 50, however the American Cancer Society advises women to receive screenings in their 40’s. Outside the United States (in Canada and most European countries), yearly mammograms are generally recommended only for women above the age of fifty.

There are things we can all do to get the best out of mammograms—however imperfect they are as a screening method. Try to go to the same facility every year. If you can’t, make sure the new facility has copies of your old mammograms. Doing so will help avoid false positives and make it easier for changes in your breast tissue to be quickly detected.

In addition, insist on getting the results of the mammogram in writing. Most facilities will mail a report, but don’t assume everything was okay if you don’t receive one. Contact the facility and request the report be mailed.

If you have dense breasts, you need to research the possibility of having a digital mammogram. Digital mammography is new technology that is better at detecting cancer in dense breast tissue.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of relying strictly on mammograms. Be sure to get a yearly clinical breast exam and keep alert to any changes in appearance or feeling in your breasts. Mammograms save lives, but if a breast lump is felt, a negative mammogram is meaningless. The woman can still have breast cancer.

Ignorance and Poverty Are Carcinogens (Excerpt from Busting Loose)

2009-11-02T18:25:00.000-08:00

BREAST CANCER SURVIVAL DIRECTLY LINKS TO POVERTY

Impoverished women are often blamed for turning a blind eye to cancer symptoms until it’s too late. Sometimes these women don’t know anything about breast cancer. Others simply don’t have a doctor. Unbelievable as it seems, both still happen.

In addition, impoverished women often won’t visit a medical office until they are too sick to be helped because they believe a doctor won’t listen to them. When the self-esteem is injured by poverty and lack of opportunities in life, it’s easy to assume that authority figures (such as doctors), will shame and ridicule. It makes complete sense, on one level. Criticism and ridicule have followed these women all the days of their lives—so why should they believe cancer will change anything?

In the comparatively wealthy area of San Francisco where I used to live, 80 percent of breast cancer diagnoses are made in the early stages. Go north ten miles, to a neighborhood like ghetto-ridden Hunter’s Point, and only 40 percent are early stage cancers. The mortality rate is much higher in these neighborhoods, mostly because the disease has advanced further before treatment.

This holds true all over the United States and the problem gets worse as the disease progresses. Those who are under-treated for cancer pain fall into one of two groups: racial minorities and the elderly. There are medications available to help these patients. But they don’t get them or even hear about them. Many also receive sub-optimal treatment, to the point where their chance of survival is minimal.

Most women who live in poverty are high achievers and have more inner strength—need I even say this?—than a hundred wealthy women. They don’t employ others to manage their homes or children; instead they are typically the sole caretakers of a large, extended family. In particular, impoverished minority women are the ultimate earth mothers, taking in their terminally ill father, grieving the untimely death of their mothers, while surviving job loss and depression. (For one of my friends, all that happened before she reached age twenty-seven.)

We live in a world where the voices of the poor are seldom heard. Where minority women have to plead and scramble for every crumb of attention. It’s no wonder these women fear being ignored or considered a whiner or complainer if they ask a doctor to check on something as “apparently commonplace” as a lump in their breast?

The upshot of this unequal situation is that social and economic status is one of the biggest factors in determining breast cancer survival. For example, African-American women have the highest death rates from breast cancer of any ethnic group in the United States. But research shows that there is nothing in their genetic background that causes the discrepancy.

In fact, black women are actually less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than Caucasian women. And when African-American women receive appropriate medical treatment their survival rate is at least as good as that of Caucasian women. No, it is the disparity in the time of diagnosis and treatment afterwards that causes the difference in mortality rates.

The terrible impact of poverty and lack of education on breast cancer mortality impacts women from all cultures. In the Hispanic community, promotoras often try in vain to help women become less secretive about breast lumps. These health educators focus on Hispanic women of lower socioeconomic status, because among these groups a breast self-exam is often considered improper. In addition, Hispanic women who have entered the country illegally often fear they will be reported to immigration if they seek medical help in the United States. The result is that the death rate from breast cancer is rising faster for Hispanic women than for any other female ethnic group.

Organizations such as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation are putting millions behind the effort to reduce the inequalities in screening and treatment access. A national program offered by the YWCA (Encore Plus) reaches out to women who face obstacles to breast and health services. Encore provides free mammograms, advocacy and referrals, as well as information and support services for breast cancer survivors in English and Spanish.

In addition, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) runs the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP). The program provides breast and cervical cancer screenings and treatment to low-income women. All 50 states offer these services NBCCEDP, since 2000 when the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Act passed. If a woman gets a mammogram through this program, and it turns out she has breast cancer, the NBCCEDP can pay for her treatment, too. And as of May 2004, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation to provide free treatment through the program as well.

To get breast cancer care through the program, you must: get your mammogram through the CDC NBCCEDP and need treatment for breast cancer (You qualify if your mammogram shows a pre-invasive condition, too), not have health insurance that covers breast cancer care, not qualify for the Medicaid program in any other way, be under age 65 (so that you can't get Medicare), and be a U. S. citizen or a "qualified alien."

There are additional programs and organizations listed in the “Helpful Organizations Glossary,” at the end of this book. Many programs offer free medicine, free long distance travel, free or low-cost care at certain centers and free breast cancer screening. Programs such as these are trying to reduce the disparity, but much more could be done. Equal access to quality breast cancer care remains a huge problem.

More information at http://www.cherylswanson.net/

Link to YWCA Encore Plus (GREAT ORGANIZATION!)

READ THE PREFACE AND FIRST CHAPTER TO BUSTING LOOSE

2009-10-29T13:14:00.003-07:00

Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

2009-10-27T01:05:00.001-07:00

Find more photos like this on Published Authors

Myths About Breast Cancer

2009-10-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't

Women are like tea bags. Put them in hot water and they get stronger. -Eleanor Roosevelt.

Some people make God their excuse for everything. They say they believe that cancer is some kind of divine retribution or judgment. They use that fallacious belief to justify rejecting treatment, even though refusing treatment is ultimately a form of suicide. Others use God as an excuse to give up without a fight or endlessly procrastinate.

Personally, I don’t believe cancer has anything to do with God. Nowhere in the writings of any religion is it written: “God is Death. Or God is Disease.” In the Judeo-Christian religion and traditions, God is justice and kindness, mercy and always, always love. Buddhism in no way rejects modern medicine and the powerful array of diagnostic and therapeutic tools at its disposal. Rather, Buddhist beliefs and practices state that medicine can be put to effective use in combating illness and should be reinforced by a deeper understanding of the inner, subjective processes of life.

If we want to find God anywhere in the cancer process (or in anything else) we should look for love. It’s surprising and wondrous how many people (most of them, truthfully, not church-goers) have this wisdom in them. When they get sick or face a tragedy, they look around for love. And they find it standing nearby by, holding out its arms. And those who are truly wise fall against that love and are held.

In addition to the dangerous myth of divine retribution, there are many more mundane old wives’ tales about cancer. In Delthia Ricks’ book, Breast Cancer Basics and Beyond, she points out: “…accusations, myths, and misinformation about breast cancer have proliferated alongside the stunning advancements made in treatment.”

None of us can afford to be blindsided, so it’s important that we recognize these old wives’ tales and myths. Here are a few of the more prevalent ones.

Breast cancer is less common than it used to be. The exact opposite is true. We’re facing an epidemic of major proportions. According to the American Cancer Society, a woman living in the United States today has a one in seven chance of developing invasive breast cancer during her lifetime. In 1975, the risk was one in eleven.

I don’t have a family history of cancer, so I’ll be okay. We believe this at our peril. Only five to ten percent of breast cancers are inherited. According to the highly-respected advocacy organization, National Breast Cancer Coalition, as reported in their Fact Sheet about Breast Cancer in the United States, 2005: “About 90 percent of women who develop breast cancer do not have a family history of the disease.”

Breast cancer is a disease of young women. This is another myth—and it’s as erroneous as it can be. While all women are at risk of getting breast cancer, midlife and older women are much more likely to get breast cancer than young women. Most breast cancers, over 77 percent, occur in women ages 50 and older. Less than five percent of all breast cancer cases occur in women under the age of 40. The median age of the most common type of breast cancer is 62, while the median age of inflammatory breast cancer, a highly serious breast cancer, is 52.

Women younger than forty years of age don’t get breast cancer. That’s the corollary of the previous myth—less commonly believed, but still a problem. Breast cancer can affect women of all ages. If a new lump in the breast persists for more than one menstrual cycle, be aggressive in having it evaluated by a doctor—no matter what your age.

Women don’t need a yearly breast exam. There are over a million women in America with undetected breast cancer. The longer it takes for these women to have their disease detected and treated, the less likely they will survive. While mammograms and clinical breast exams don’t detect all breast cancers, they cut the death rate by a third.

I do monthly breast self-exams. That’s the best way to diagnose breast cancer. Actually, while a surprising proportion of women find their own cancer, plenty do not. For a woman who has never done regular breast self-exams, a good time to start is directly after a doctor’s exam, when we know that everything is currently normal. The self-exam should be used to get to know our breasts, as an intimate part of our bodies. If we do it that way, not just to find “lumps,” then we feel much more positive about the experience.

I don’t have any of the risk factors, so I won’t get cancer. Only around 20 percent of women have breast cancer that is connected to risk factors. These factors include: an earlier age at menarche, later age at menopause, nulliparity (never giving birth), heavy alcohol consumption, use of hormonal replacement therapy, use of the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES), esposure to ionizing radiation and postmenopausal obesity. Eighty percent of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer don’t have any more of these risk factors than the general population. As one doctor succinctly put it: “The major risk factor for breast cancer? It’s having a breast.”

Don’t be suckered by the myths, get educated about your disease. The more you know the more empowered you will be.

New Breast Cancer Survivor's Guide Explodes the Stereotypes--Excerpt per day posted

2009-10-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

Kill Fear before it Kills You

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by the spectral throat? -Joseph Conrad

She had the most intense gray eyes I’d ever seen. Her demeanor matched her eyes. A quality of total attention. A stillness. The consulting room was deathly quiet.

She looked at my husband, then at me. A small woman, long-fingered surgeon’s hands, a head too big for her body. She was the chief of Breast Surgery at the most respected teaching hospital in northern California. I could imagine her lecturing to medical students, admonishing arrogant residents to pay attention. Little did I know that I was going to come to both love and hate this small woman more than anyone I’d ever met in my life.

“You have breast cancer,” she said.

My brain took it in, but I wasn’t tracking properly. I didn’t believe her.

She pointed to a series of films mounted on light-boards and plunged into a medical discussion. My husband got up and followed her around, looking carefully at everything and asking for more details. His scientific mind was working hard—trying to disprove what she’d asserted.

Within seconds, I realized I couldn’t hear them, although they were only a few feet away. Reality was starting to penetrate—I have cancer. I have cancer. I have can—a high-pitched scream rose inside, like the shriek of a hysterical child.

Maybe I did scream. Because another doctor, a surgeon-in-training, reached out and patted my hand. “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” she said cozily.

I wanted to flip her out of that operatory like I was a heroine in a Jackie Chan movie. What would she say if her plane suddenly lurched, or if she was in a dark alley and a stranger lunged? Make lemonade? Both of these women were going to be involved in my treatment and in some ways I owe my life to each of them. But I think at the moment I would have sold my soul to have never met either one.

I was about to freak out. Correction: I was freaking out. My thoughts reverted to a white-water raft trip I’d taken in Idaho. The T-shirts the guides gave us read: “This place sucks. And you’re not getting out.” I was being sucked down in a whirlpool and nothing was going to save me.

I don’t want to scare you, but that’s how it happens. When we first learn we have breast cancer, fear is no longer an emotion. It is a demon that takes control of our body and confuses our mind.

And here’s the really bad news. You can’t stop the fear…not entirely.

But there is one thing I wish I had known during that first appointment. One thing I wish every woman on earth could be told—because it would make the early days much easier.

That screaming voice warning of coming darkness?

It’s telling a lie.

You will survive your cancer. Maybe not forever, but then no one lives forever. You will survive it long enough to enjoy many good times ahead. You will certainly survive it long enough to fully comprehend all your treatment options and get a second opinion—so don’t let your doctors rush you. And more likely than not, you will also survive it long enough to accomplish all your hopes and dreams.

And here’s something else to keep in mind, because it is tremendously helpful.

Nothing will ever terrify you as much as being told you have cancer. Nothing that happens afterwards will be as traumatic as the moment you hear that initial diagnosis.

Every women I’ve spoken with—including those who are facing their last days with the disease—have confirmed that the initial diagnosis is the most frightening and painful time in the whole experience. No surgery, no treatment, no physical pain, in fact, no other experience except the loss of a loved one, hurts as terribly as hearing those three words: “You have cancer.”

But once we’ve survived that, we’re well on the way to becoming an entirely different person. Stronger. Better. More ready for life with all its joys and sorrows.

Finding out you have breast cancer is like being thrown in an abyss. But there’s a bottom down there somewhere and once you reach it, you’re already past the worst.

More tips will be printed each day...Book is available on Amazon,