9/27 Cancer Bitch

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Cancer Bitch The Passive Cancer Patient September 26, 2009 at 2:06 am She said, Did you ask your oncologist what she thought about the calcifications? I said, No, I forgot. Then I thought better of it and thought maybe I had asked. I said, I think I did. I keep forgetting about it. She said, It seems you either are at zero, not worrying at all, or way up here, thinking about dying. You need to be able to tolerate a 3, to do what you need to do. She said, It takes energy for you to forget about it, because you're not really forgetting, it's in the back of your mind. She told me how she went to four doctors who all said she didn't have cancer. The breast surgeon told her she was a hysterical female. She waited a month or two and finally insisted on surgery and of course it was malignant. She reported the doctor to the board of whatever, but there were no consequences. The form the Breast Experts gave me in June and December and in June again said "calcifications that are probably benign." The radiologist in December said I could have an MRI if I wanted but warned me about false positives. Now, she said cancer begins as calcifications, if it bothers you, you need to do something about it. She said, It's labor-intensive for them to read MRIs, that's why they don't like to do them. And: it's labor-intensive to do a biopsy using ultrasound and they don't make much profit from it. She said Fancy Hospital was on the TV news because they had a backlog of mammogram patients and they didn't have enough radiologists though they promised to get more. A local TV station reported earlier this month that at Fancy Hospital, women have to wait between 8 months and a year to schedule a mammogram. ABC7 checked with six other hospitals in the area and all were able to schedule a mammogram within a few weeks. Fancy says that there's a shortage of radiologists. But it seems to be restricted to only one block in the city. Calcifications can be malignant--they don't turn malignant, they can begin that way. "Probably benign" can mean that there's an 80-98 percent chance that they're benign. MSN reports: Please note that some specialists may prefer additional testing (breast MRI, biopsy, etc.) while others may be more conservative. A lot has to do with your personal or family breast health history. I still think the calcifications are not cancerous. But I don't know for sure. I emailed my surgeon's nurse and asked for an MRI. She wrote back today and said that she sent over the order, that I should call the MRI division and make an appointment, that it would take a few days to get precertification, but that insurance might not pay for it. Because it's elective, I suppose. But it's not like I'm doing it for vanity. And it's odd--usually the doctors prescribe extensive tests to CYA. There's a blog written by The Assertive Cancer Patient. This is not that.   This email was sent to cancerinfo09@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.

9/24 Cancer Bitch

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Cancer Bitch Talking to a stone September 24, 2009 at 1:13 am I am the stone. I've heard over and over that exercise is important in keeping breast cancer from coming back. I even have an exercise book especially for bc survivors. I haven't looked at it for months and months. But I keep getting emails from our rowing coach, J, about exercise and breast cancer and on the ROW website she has links to articles that extoll the value of exercise in keeping metastasis at bay. Finally it sunk in. Monday I went to rowing practice, and Tuesday and tonight I rowed at the YMCA. I also rowed last week. I know I should cross-train but I like doing one thing over and over and over. (That must be why I created a workshop called The Joy, Joy, Joy of Repetition.) Just about everybody there except me has an iPod. I look at the TV when I'm sitting back up and leaning back. I watched part of The Office last night, and when it was over I switched it to the PBS station. Uh oh. PBS didn't have closed captioning. But I was already strapped into the rowing machine so I just watched people's mouths move. They were talking about Milton Bradley, the out-of-control Cub and I could presume what they were saying. I am interested in him because of his name. You know, like the board-game company. Tonight I watched the Nature Channel on Colony Collapse Disorder. I learned that in Sichuan in China, where a pesticide has wiped out the bee population, people do the pollination. It's very labor-intensive, as you might imagine, and involves sticks with feathers on the ends. One solution to the disorder is to bring in Africanized bees that are resistant to CCD. But those bees are aggressive and who knows what they might do? or what a hybrid bee would be like? We should all be as busy as bees, and develop our own waggle dances. Or just pull back and forth, back and forth to get our heart rates up. Alas, it appears that bees don't listen, either. New research shows that bees observing the dance often ignore it. I need 150 minutes of exercise a week to be called moderately fit. So far I've had about 75. That's not counting yoga, and it's only Wednesday. [The increasingly rare bee suit]   This email was sent to cancerinfo09@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.

9/23 Appendix Cancer Survivor's Blog

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Appendix Cancer Survivor's Blog Inflammation September 22, 2009 at 10:36 am There's a great article in the new issue of Cure magazine, "The Internal Flame" about the connection between chronic inflammation and cancer. I attended several scientific presentations about the inflammation-cancer connection at the AACR annual meeting this year. Long term inflammation from chronic infections, such as hepatitic C, are associated with the development of cancer. Some autoimmune diseases are also associated with an increase cancer risk. It has been discovered that cancer in essence hijacks our immune system processes to promote it's own growth and metastasis...what our body means for our good, cancer uses to proliferate it's own growth and destructive processes. I have an autoimumne disease also, rheumatoid arthritis. Kind of interesting, cancer in the end caused my RA to worsen, as I had my ovaries removed in my cytoreduction surgery. The early menopause initiated by the removal of my ovaries caused my RA to escalate, which in turn caused me to become dependent on more immune/inflammation suppressing drugs to control that disease. I also take a chemotherapy drug weekly, methotrexate, to control my RA. Interesting how the use of that drug came to treat autoimmune diseases. Woman who had RA and cancer and who were treated with methotrexate for cancer went into remission of their RA while they received it. They experimented with dosages until they found the lowest possible effective dosage of the chemotherapy for inducing remission in RA and other autoimmune diseases. They know it works, but not why. More chemotherapies are being tested for use in autoimmune disease. It is so interesting that drugs that suppress cancer also suppress inflammatory autoimmune disease while at the same time inflammation is being associated with cancer occurrence. I am also on several drugs to suppress my immune system and inflammatory responses, including low dose steroids. Interesting too, that a protein our body creates and that can destroy some types of cancer cells, TNF (tumor necrosis factor), also plays a part in the destructive inflammation of RA and other autoimmune diseases. It was suggested once that I take new drugs that block the effect of tumor necrosis factor. I felt that if I had an over-abundance of this protein, in light of my cancer history, I didn't want to "block" it. I'm waiting to see long term studies about the cancer incidence in those taking these new drugs. I don't believe patients with a cancer history were included in initial clinical trials of these drugs. At first, after I was diagnosed with cancer, I was afraid of suppressing my immune system with the RA drugs...don't we all want a good immune system and hope our immune system will prevent our cancers form recurring? I was so afraid suppressing my immune system would make me vulnerable to a cancer recurrence. Now after reading a lot about the cancer-inflammation connection, I wonder if all of these drugs that suppress my inflammatory responses and immune system might in the end help protect me from cancer? But then again I wonder if my malfunctioning immune system and chronic inflammatory disease had anything to do with my cancer occurring in the first place. It's a mystery. I don't know, but I continue to take my drugs as they keep me in remission from RA, and I haven't had a cancer recurrence in 8 years, so the drugs certainly do not seem to be hurting me in that regard. But it makes me especially intrigued by the new connections between cancer and inflammation...I'm watching that research closely.   This email was sent to cancerinfo09@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.

9/21 Cancer Bitch

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Cancer Bitch What's on my food? September 21, 2009 at 1:51 am I found a new-ish (launched this summer) website that tells you what pesticides you're ingesting with each piece of fruit or vegetable. Kind of; it tells you what was on a sampling of foods in 2007, and what damage those pesticides can do. It's part of the Pesticide Action Network. (Oh no, does that mean we gotta do something and not just complain??) Follow-up September 20, 2009 at 3:51 pm Swedish researchers found that eating foods that were high in acrylamide did not cause breast cancer. To wit: During a mean follow-up of 17.4 years, a total of 2,952 incident cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in the cohort. In multivariate analyses controlling for breast cancer risk factors, no statistically significant association was observed between long-term acrylamide intake (assessed at baseline and in 1997) and the risk of breast cancer, overall or by estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) status. Interestingly, in looking through media reports about acrylamide, I've found many hostile responses in the Comments sections, some calling the info "junk science." How valid are the accusations? Who knows? But it seems that some researchers consider the substance to be a danger.   This email was sent to cancerinfo09@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.