Breast Cancer

Click Date to read brief description	Click Short Title to read column
04/02/07	The balance between life and disease
01/22/07	How to cope with shock of cancer diagnosis
03/06/06	Getting Warmer in Bid to Kill Tumors
10/03/05	You're Getting Sleepy; Could That Stop Cancer?
08/22/05	A Diagnosis Of Cancer Is Trying For Any Marriage
04/20/04	New Cancer Therapy Easier on the Patient
03/12/02	Sentinel Node Biopsy - Ready for Prime Time?
01/29/02	Should you have that Mammogram?
10/24/00	Stressed out
03/29/99	Hopes dim for controversial breast cancer treatment
10/06/97	Does it matter when you have a mammogram or breast surgery?
03/10/97	Lymphedema finally getting some attention
08/05/96	Menstrual cycles and rhythm of disease
10/09/95	For some, pregnancy option remains after breast cancer
08/14/95	The day that many women dread the most

Like many other Americans lately, I’ve found myself thinking hard about – and personally identifying with – the dilemma faced by Elizabeth Edwards and her husband, John, the former senator and would-be president. His career, her health. Not an easy balancing act. Who should sacrifice for whom? How much? Nobody wants to be – or live with – a martyr. But nobody wants to deal with – or watch a loved one deal with – cancer unsupported, either. Ultimately, everybody’s mental health counts – the sick partner’s, the healthy one’s, and the kids’.

Late last fall, Dartmouth Medical School researchers reported in the journal Cancer that all newly diagnosed breast cancer patients in their study experienced at least some level of distress, and nearly half met the criteria for a significant psychiatric disorder such as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

A year ago, when Gayle Driscoll's, breast cancer recurred on her skin, the 63-year-old retired teacher from Barnstable tried an experimental treatment that gave her radiation therapy some extra oomph . Every time she lay down for radiation treatment on her chest, her tumors were also heated with a special device that emitted radio frequency waves. After six weeks, the skin tumors were gone.

Melatonin, long known to insomniac Americans as an over-the-counter sleep aid, is now being studied as a way to prevent and treat breast and other cancers. Dubbed the "hormone of darkness," melatonin is a hormone that is made by the brain's pineal gland at nighttime. This summer, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital led by pidemiologist Dr. Eva Schernhammer showed that women who produced the lowest levels of melatonin had a 70 percent higher chance of getting breast cancer than those with the highest levels.

Cancer can be very tough on a marriage just ask Sandro Segalini, 64, of Falmouth. His first wife died of breast cancer 14 years ago. His second wife, Marcia Woltjer, 59, left him earlier this year, three years after her own diagnosis with breast cancer. Segalini, a retired businessman, had been totally willing to take control of things and help Woltjer the way he had helped his first wife to be, as he put it, "chief cook, bottle washer, bandage changer, and jester."

Eighty-two year old Marie Desilets lives in Dunstable, about an hour's drive from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. When she discovered that she needed radiation for breast cancer a year or so ago, she faced a dilemma.

Anna Coppinger, 61, a school cafeteria worker from Hingham, lies waiting outside the operating room at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, chatting with her husband and daughters - and wincing whenever she jostled the needle that had been placed in her left breast several hours earlier to guide surgeons to the exact spot where her tumor lay.

Let those biostatisticians slug it out down at the National Cancer Institute - I’m getting my yearly mammograms anyway. Then again, the way things are going, should I?

Burned by lawsuits and low pay, radiologists are quitting, making women wait longer to find if they have breast cancer for or years, breast cancer specialists have quite rightly touted mammograms as the best way to detect tumors while they're small and highly treatable.

Convinced by doctors that bone marrow transplantation offered the best chance at survival, thousands of women with breast cancer have agreed to the controversial procedure -- despite the lack of proof that it could save, or even prolong, their lives more than standard therapy. Indeed, so many women -- about 5,000 women a year -- now undergo the treatment, arguably the most devastating procedure in modern medicine, that breast cancer has become the most common reason for transplants, edging out leukemia.

This summer, a Canadian study of nearly 7,000 women came to a startling conclusion: that a mammogram done during the second half of the menstrual cycle is twice as likely to miss a lurking cancer as one taken during the first half.

Marianne Lynnworth, 66, a writer and former geographer, isn't sure why she got lymphedema, though she thinks a case of frostbite when she was a teenager probably touched off a hereditary tendency to the disease. But she sure does know what a struggle it's been for the last 52 years.

What if you had breast cancer and discovered that timing surgery to coincide with a particular point in the menstrual cycle might make a difference in your prognosis? Or what if you had diabetes and learned that insulin sensitivity varies with menstrual rhythms?

It was early fall, 1993 -- decision time for Ann Wheeler of Brookline. She was 42, a self-described "late bloomer," and she had finally resolved that with or without her boyfriend's assistance, she was going to get pregnant by spring and have the baby she'd dreamed of for years.

The waiting room is hushed, as always. The women sit in silence, lined up in chairs against the wall, clad in flimsy johnnies, leafing pointlessly through old magazines.