boobs4breasts.com Blog

Never underestimate your partners willingness to play and be intimate.  Boobs are a playground of discovery and another set of hands can cover more ground so to speak.

BeThree has an interesting post with tips from Stefanie LaRue about breast cancer and how her boyfriend found a lump while playing.

our breasts are playgrounds  Via [bethree]

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Today I read the story of Stefanie LaRue the opening lines of her biography seem so clinical so inevitable.

“Stefanie LaRue is a young Cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 Metastatic (advanced/life threatening) Breast Cancer when she was only 30 years old, after having been misdiagnosed by several physicians, allowing the tumor to grow and become more virulent. Stefanie was given one year to live.”

Thats only the start of her Breast cancer story she is inspirational and actively promotes getting checked even if you are “too young and don’t fit the profile”.

You can check out the Stefanie LaRue Advocacy Coalition (SLAC) at

http://www.metooyoutoo.org/

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MEXICO CITY, March 14 (Xinhua) — Mexico and the United States said Friday they would join hands to fight breast cancer as First Ladies of the two countries, Laura Bush and Margarita Zavala, signed an agreement on the cooperation in this regard.

The two countries will cooperate in research and awareness-building regarding the disease, according to the agreement.

U.S. ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza said that the accord’s goal is to “increase the early detection to reduce mortality rate with more profound public awareness, more clinical resources and investigation.”

The two First Ladies, saying that early detection is the best way to cure the disease, called Mexican women to attend medical checkups to increase the possibilities of curing the disease.

Laura Bush recalled that 25 years ago U.S. women were afraid and ashamed to talk about breast cancer, making it difficult to diagnose it on time.

She also said that Mexican and U.S. scientists would share their knowledge and define joint research strategies to discover new treatment for the disease.

Statistics from Mexico’s Cancer Institute (INC) said the disease is the second cause of death among Mexican women aged between 30 and 54.

Worldwide, some 1 million new cases of this disease are detected yearly.

Laura Bush also asked for joint efforts worldwide to fight this disease.

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March 15, 2008

ST. JOHN’S — Since she found the lump in her breast in 2001, Beverly Green’s clock has been ticking steadily down.At various points, doctors have posited when her time will run out. In 2006, after recurring cancer had riddled her liver with tumours, the span was a few years; it narrowed to six months when drugs caused the cancer to further explode, then widened again after chemo.

During a bout of fever last year that prompted Ms. Green to drag herself to the hospital alone in the middle of the night, she was told she could be dead by morning. She was discharged at 6 a.m.

“I don’t really plan on dying,” Ms. Green, 45, said in a recent interview, her pallor artfully disguised beneath rosy blush and cranberry lips, her sea-blue eyes flashing under light brown eyebrows she had dusted on.

Ms. Green knows she’s in the throes of a wicked fight. Aside from falling prey to a ravenous metastasizing breast cancer, Ms. Green, like several hundred more cancer patients in Newfoundland, is a victim of the province’s breast cancer testing scandal.

For eight years, botched tests went undetected by Eastern Health, the province’s largest health authority and only centre for cancer testing and treatment. In 2005, after retesting more than 1,000 cases, the authority discovered hundreds of patients had been given wrong test results and had their chances of beating the disease unknowingly slashed.

Last month, Newfoundland’s Supreme Court ordered the release of several reports Eastern Health kept secret for two years, which offered damning analyses of the quality of work done in the lab.

“You had a feeling when you read that there were people there who didn’t know what they were doing,” said Minnie Hoyles, 59, who was given wrong test results when she was diagnosed with breast cancer nine years ago. The lab is responsible for all of the province’s high-level cancer analyses, called immunohistochemistry tests, including the critical hormone-receptor tests done for breast cancer patients. Typically, results from the test provide a foundation for a patient’s entire cancer treatment plan.

With revelations from the reports still reverberating across the province, a public inquiry into the testing scandal is set to begin Tuesday. It remains to be seen whether it will allay spreading insecurities about the quality of cancer care in Newfoundland. Some women who were given incorrect test results told The Globe and Mail they fear that speaking publicly – to the newspaper and at the inquiry – about the impact of the scandal on their lives will jeopardize their chances of getting good cancer care if they get sick, or sicker.

“After you have cancer, it’s a life of dread,” Ms. Hoyles said.

Gerry Rogers, a St. John’s-based documentary filmmaker who is one of the women who received wrong test results, said the scandal should be a “wakeup call” for Canadians.

“When you’re dealing with cancer, you need to feel totally confident. Our health-care system, since the [Paul] Martin government, was chipped and chipped and chipped away at,” she said. “As Canadians, we have a right to excellent care, universal, excellent care across the country.”

A horrifying discovery

The realization that something had gone horribly wrong with tests in the province’s immunohistochemical lab, which processes about 1,000 sophisticated cancer tests each month, began to set in during the spring of 2005. For years, high staff turnover rates and a lack of resources had been plaguing the lab, causing it to issue occasional “unreliable, erratic” tests results, according to internal lab reports.

“It was happening in oncology and it was happening in pathology. They were chronic areas in health care that were underfunded and understaffed,” said Kara Laing, the province’s lead oncologist. “You’re busy and you’re flying by the seat of your pants. It’s not as easy to look for trends or to find things.”

The extent of problems created by that cycle didn’t begin coming to light until Joy McCarthy, one of the province’s medical oncologists, stumbled across them while troubleshooting for a breast cancer patient who wasn’t responding to her treatment plan.

Retesting of the patient, who has not been publicly named, revealed that the lab had given the woman – and Dr. McCarthy – incorrect test results three years earlier. As a result, the patient was told she was estrogen receptor negative. This meant she wasn’t eligible for the hormone therapy Tamoxifen. The largest-selling breast cancer drug in the world, Tamoxifen is given to eligible patients and can drastically reduce rates of recurrence.

A handful of other similar cases were retested. When officials learned that they, too, had been given wrong results – meaning all the patients’ treatment plans were based on false information – a probe was launched to see how many victims had missed out on medication that could have vastly improved their prognosis.

“Was this one or two people, or was it going to be 100 people? We had no idea,” Dr. Laing said.

Exactly how many patients were affected is still unclear. Eastern Health retested results of more than 1,000 patients who, between 1997 and 2005, were told they were estrogen receptor negative. By the end of 2007, more than 300 of that group had died, although it is unknown how many died as a result of cancer, said Dr. Laing.

Of the 1,000 retested, more than 300 learned they were originally given incorrect results. In turn, many were belatedly offered hormone treatment.

The ones not retested

There is also a second faction of patients, ones who had tests done at the lab but did not have their results redone after the scandal broke. They originally tested positive for hormone receptors and, therefore, wouldn’t have missed out on the treatment. But many have begun to worry that their positive diagnoses were incorrect – and that they received toxic treatments they didn’t need.

Dr. Laing confirmed that most patients who first tested positive were not included in the retest. The restrictive review has bred concerns that more troubling results have been brushed aside.

“I feel like I got pushed under the rug,” said Pam, a 47-year-old stay-at-home mom from Mount Pearl who asked that her last name not be used.

Diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago, she began to have anxieties about her treatment when she learned of the testing scandal. She asked that her positive results be retested. However, doctors refused the request because she wasn’t denied hormone treatment.

When she was diagnosed, Pam was put on Tamoxifen – a five-year treatment with side effects that include heart, eye and bone problems, and increased risks of developing ovarian and uterine cancer. She seems to have contracted a bad cocktail of those effects. Her eyesight is failing. In 2006, her cancerous ovaries were removed. Currently, she’s having monthly Pap tests so doctors can monitor precancerous cells in her uterus.

“So, am I a ticking time bomb? My doctor thinks I’m getting obsessed with questioning the health-care system. I probably am,” Pam said. “The not knowing is not going to go away until I know it is retested and the initial test is affirmed. I could have been on the wrong drug. Instead of having my breast removed … my body wouldn’t be mutilated. Maybe I wouldn’t have had ovarian cancer. For all of the things I’ve endured, maybe I didn’t need to.”

Even for those whose test results were reversed after the review, questions still linger about whether their cancer battles could have been less painful or better fought. Many oncologists agree that hormone therapy is more likely to work when given early in treatment. Still, Ms. Hoyles and a slew of other patients whose test results were reversed have opted, years after their original treatments, to take the pills as a kind of insurance therapy. It remains to be seen whether the benefits will outweigh the side effects.

“I remember going in, crying, practically begging for Tamoxifen,” Ms. Hoyles recalled of her original 1999 diagnosis. “I know it’s only medication. It’s not foolproof. I wanted to do anything to prevent [a recurrence].”

For Ms. Green, news of her eligibility for that last-ditch therapy came too late. In the midst of yet another round of chemo to keep her liver cancer at bay, she jokes about why she’s been placed at the top of the roster to testify at the inquiry next week. But there is worry in her voice. She’s attuned to the fact that she may not live to learn the results of the inquiry, let alone the victims’ class-action lawsuit, which will sit paralyzed until the inquiry is through.

“I know I have an illness I’m probably going to die from,” Ms. Green admitted last week. She added: “I do think this deserves some kind of fight. People make mistakes. Things happen. But this is a lot of people. It’s a lot of mistakes.

“Maybe we can stop it from happening again.”

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There’s a new, accelerated treatment option for people who have had a lumpectomy due to breast cancer.

“This particular protocol is really very exciting,” says Dr. Pradip Ganguly, division chief of radiation oncology with Eastern Health.

The new method of delivering internal radiation therapy is being introduced at the Dr. H. Bliss Murphy Cancer Centre.

MammoSite radiation therapy delivers radiation directly to where the tumour was removed as well as to the surrounding area.

The therapy is much less invasive than full breast radiation, Ganguly explained.

“This is equivalent to going back in the surgical days, but instead of taking out the whole breast you take part of the breast,” he said.

Within two weeks of the patient’s lumpectomy, a MammoSite balloon is surgically placed inside the breast where the tumour was removed. To illustrate, Ganguly holds the small balloon-like device attached to a piece of plastic tubing. The tubing remains outside the breast, he said.

Once an ultrasound confirms that the balloon has been properly placed in the breast cavity, it is inflated to fill the area and the patient goes home.

The patient then returns as an outpatient to begin a five-day period of twice-daily treatments where a specialized piece of equipment sends radiation into the balloon.

The good news for the patient, Ganguly says, is that MammoSite radiation therapy reduces treatment from weeks to less than a week.

“This means if we have someone coming from Corner Brook, or somewhere else far off, they don’t have to stay here in the hostel or rent a place for five to six weeks,” he said.

The doctor noted that breast cancer patients are concerned about how their bodies will look after surgery and treatment.

Good cosmetic results

The breast looks almost the same after a lumpectomy as it did before, he said, and MammoSite radiation therapy also gives a good cosmetic result.

According to the Canadian Cancer Society (www.cancer.ca), breast cancer is the most common cancer among Canadian women, with an average of 429 women diagnosed every week. About 102 Canadian women die of breast cancer each week.

Of course, not everyone with breast cancer is a suitable candidate for partial breast radiation or a lumpectomy. Factors such as age, tumour size and grade and hormone receptor status must be taken into consideration, Ganguly said.

It’s also important that the cancer hasn’t spread to lymph nodes.

Patients who meet all the criteria and who are 50 years and older may be considered for MammoSite radiation therapy. The surgeon must receive extensive training.

So far, in this province, Dr. Al Felix in St. John’s and Dr. Valerie Jefford in Corner Brook have completed training in MammoSite radiation.

“We’ve had one patient go through this so far and it went like a charm. We even had a pizza party because it went so smoothly,” Ganguly said.

Once six patients have received the treatment, the team will review the protocol before continuing with the treatment.

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