My birthday is looming. I’ve never been concerned about my age, but I’ve never been this old before. I still picture myself as a 27-year-old woman and yet, I am so far removed from that age group it is depressing.

I was driving home from my friend Linda’s house (by the way, she is older than me) in this 90-degree heat with my air on 70 (because I don’t like to freeze, especially in summer), when I felt my seat warmer come on. What was so strange about it is that my seat only warms from the seat area, not the back, and that’s where I was feeling the heat. I checked the dial on the dashboard but the knob read 0. Strange. I reached around and felt the seat and it wasn’t hot to the touch. Then I realized the heat I feeling was radiating from the inside of my body, starting from my back and wrapping around my torso, causing me to shake and sweat – and I’m not talking a damp brow, but a sweat that drenched my scalp and clothes before I even pulled into my driveway.

I’ve been blogging about menopause and the risks of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for the law firm long enough to know that my symptoms were frightfully similar to that of a hot flash. But I can’t imagine that I’m old enough to be going through “the change.” A little symptom Googling and I surmised that it could likely have been a low blood sugar issue. My nurse practitioner friend Kathy said it was possible, but more likely I experienced a hot flash. I described a text book case. She said if my mother went through perimenopause at an early age, I likely could as well.

I can’t ask my mother because she’s dead. And thanks to my regular blogging with the law firm, I now am convinced her HRT killed her.

One most often hears of the connection between HRT and breast cancer. In 1991, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute launched the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a 15-year research program to address the most common causes of death, disability and poor quality of life in postmenopausal women – cardiovascular disease, cancer and osteoporosis. WHI consisted of a hormone trial and that is where researchers began to see an alarming trend –women on HRT were at an increased risk of serious health complications, most notably, breast cancer. The link between HRT and breast cancer has spurred numerous lawsuits against the makers of the one-time wildly popular Premarin and Prempro. People don’t hear so much about the uterine cancer risk because it’s a little different.

You can look up the connection between HRT and uterine cancer (also known as endometrial cancer) at the American Cancer Society or the National Institutes of Health and they’ll tell you the same thing – that the risk for endometrial cancer (this affects women who still have their uterus) is more than five times higher in women who take estrogen-only therapy (ERT) compared to estrogen plus progestin (HRT). Thus, women who no longer have a uterus are often prescribed ERT and women with a uterus are given HRT, which does not carry the same risk of endometrial cancer.

Years ago when my mother sat down with her general practitioner and requested help overcoming her symptoms of menopause, her GP gave her a choice – one pill would keep her menstruating, the other would not. She made the obvious choice. Perhaps the GP was unaware of the increased risk of uterine cancer with ERT. Maybe researchers were still combing the data. But the fact remains, my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. The next three years involved painful surgeries and procedures. The last six months were of excruciating pain.

My OB/GYN dismisses this connection. He says estrogen-receptor positive cancers are usually less aggressive and easier to treat. Sure, some studies show uterine cancer has an 84.4 percent survival rate. That hardly matters when you fall in the 15.6 range.

If it was a hot flash I experienced and I am embarking on my path down the shady road of perimenopause, I will not choose to take HRT. The risks are just not worth it to me. If the symptoms get worse – and I hear they often do – I will seek out holistic methods, acupuncture, yoga or whatever. And I will pray never to suffer like my mother had to.

Photo, Flikr, erix

A new wellness program designed especially for cancer patients has been developed in Iowa. The family of Jane Borg Cook, from Cedar Rapids, lost their mother to breast cancer but is helping to turn their grief into a positive thing for others struggling with cancer. They have donated “$75,000 to create the new Jane Borg Cook Wellness Program at St. Luke’s.”

The program will open late in the summer and be free to patients. The center will help cancer patients with “physical, nutritional and psychosocial support” and also help others with chronic conditions.

Image: sxc.hu.

Breast ultrasound examination might eliminate the need for biopsy in many cases of lumps found in a teenager’s breast, researchers at Loyola University Health System recently concluded.

While teenage girls often will undergo an excisional biopsy when a lump is found, that may not be necessary, say the researchers. Breast cancer is rare in adolescents, and most lumps are benign masses related to hormones.

For the study, published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, radiologists performed ultrasound examinations on 20 girls who had lumps in their breasts. The girls were ages 13 to 19. The ultrasounds showed that 15 of the 21 lumps appeared benign.  Six of the lumps were suspicious.

After the ultrasound exams, biopsies or examinations revealed that all 21 lumps were benign. Loyola researchers believe that the study findings suggest that if a breast ultrasound finds nothing suspicious, the teen likely doesn’t need an excisional biopsy.

Of course, rare doesn’t mean impossible. Persistent lumps in a teen’s breast should always be examined by a doctor who can provide the medical advice necessary in each individual case.

Are you a teen who’s undergone excisional biopsy of the breast?

(Image via stock.xchng)

Breast cancer. After skin cancer, it’s the most common cancer in women in the United States. American women have a one in eight chance of developing some type of breast cancer in their lifetime. The American Cancer Society says that “an estimated 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed among women in the United States.” But, as shocking at the numbers may be, it’s not new news. We’ve heard it all before.

Imagine now, a 10-year-old girl discovering a lump in her breast tissue - a lump that turns out to be cancer. Not only that, the type of cancer she has is so rare, it only affects .15% of women who have breast cancer. That 10-year-old girl is Hannah Powell-Auslam of Fullerton, California, and she discovered she had cancer this past April.

Breast cancer in adolescents isn’t unheard of, but to have such a rare type of adult cancer is virtually unknown. Her doctors aren’t sure why Hannah developed the breast cancers, although there are a couple of theories. One is that she could be carrying the gene that makes breast cancer more common in certain families, or it could be because of all the pollutants in the air, settling in the breast tissue as the breasts begin to develop.

Hannah has had a mastectomy and is undergoing chemotherapy. If you’d like to see a clip about Hannah, click on the TV screen below. You can also visit the website Hannah’s parents put up to share Hannah’s story: Our Little Sweet Pea .

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Images: Stock.xchng, iStock

If being diagnosed with breast cancer isn’t enough of a nightmare, how would finding out that your breast cancer test results may wrong feel like? That’s what is happening to thousands of women in the Canadian province of Quebec.

A study, done out of the University of Montreal, had concluded that between 15 and 20% of breast cancer tests had been interpreted incorrectly and that many women may have been given the wrong type of treatment based on this erroneous test results.

It is important, however, to understand that just because the tests may have been incorrect, this does *not* mean that all those women would have received the wrong treatment.

There is also some debate as to whether the study is all that strong as it was a relatively small study in terms of research.

Not a First

Sadly, this isn’t the first time Canadian women have faced problems with their breast cancer test results. Earlier this year, women in the province of Newfoundland, Canada’s easternmost province, learned that a few hundred women had received incorrect test results.

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Tamoxifen is a popular medication that may help reduce the risk of certain types of breast cancer by interfering with estrogen activity, which can promote tumor growth. Although there are several side effects that may cause problems (blood clots and cancer of the uterus, for example), it’s been found that tamoxifen’s benefits tend to outweigh the risks. (National Cancer Institute )

However, we know that people don’t get sick in a vacuum. Many women (and men) who have breast cancer may be ill with other diseases or disorders, which means they may be taking other medications that could end up interacting with tamoxifen. For this reason, research into tamoxifen and its interaction with other medications is essential. Read more

Women have been told for a while that their diet of red meat could contribute to the development of breast cancer. However, as happens with many studies involving food, this finding has just been negated by another study.

According to the study, published in a recent issue of the International Journal of Cancer, there is “no support for a role of meat mutagens in the development of postmenopausal breast cancer.”

The researchers took into account the reports of red meat or meat cooked at high temperatures and their relationship with an increased incidence of breast cancer among women. They then looked at meat consumption in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study cohort. The study 120,755 postmenopausal women who reported their food intake when they entered the study in 1995 to 1996, and the provided information on what they ate and how it was prepared, over the next eight years.

During this 8 years of follow-up, 3,818 cases of invasive breast cancer were found - not more than one would expect to find.

Of course, as with all such studies, this type of finding may change yet again, but it’s seemingly good news for women who do eat red meat.

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Image: Stock.xchng

If you’ve followed golfer Phil Mickelson’s career, you may be familiar with his wife, 37-year-old Amy. The two have been married since the mid 90s and Amy is often seen in the crowd when her husband plays.

Unfortunately, they are yet another couple that has been touched by breast cancer. Her diagnosis was revealed earlier today as Phil announced that he was withdrawing from the Byron Nelson Championship and has taken an indefinite leave from play while they and their three young children deal with this new reality.

Hopefully, theirs will be another successful fight.

According to Breastcancer.org, 1 in 8 women in the United States will develop breast cancer. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the US.

Women who have close relatives who had breast cancer (mother, sister) have a higher risk of developing it, particularly if there is a genetic component to the cancer.

Although it’s a lot less common, men get breast cancer too. They have breast tissue that can be affected. Unfortunately, because men don’t usually check themselves nor do doctors check them for lumps in the breast, it’s often discovered late. The signs of breast cancer are the same in men.

What are the signs and symptoms of breast cancer?

Besides doing a regular self-examination of your breasts, the American Cancer Society says that any of the these unusual changes could be a symptom of breast cancer:

• swelling of all or part of the breast
• skin irritation or dimpling
• breast pain
• nipple pain or the nipple turning inward
• redness, scaliness, or thickening of the nipple or breast skin
• a nipple discharge other than breast milk
• a lump in the underarm area

If you have any of those signs, please get yourself checked. Don’t wait. A false alarm may be frightening, but it’s better than ignoring it.

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Image: Newscom.com

No one likes to hear that someone has breast cancer, but especially when news is that someone is only a 10-year-old girl. That’s right it was announced that a 10 year old by the name of Hannah Powell-Auslam from California was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hannah only learned last month that she had it and she too was shocked.

IMG: sxc.hu

Many, myself included believe that a person cannot get breast cancer until they are adults, as we can see this is not always the case. Her family has decided to make a website chronicling her battle with the beast. Already she’s had a mastectomy to remove a 2 inch tumor from her left breast. Thankfully they caught this now. According to reports she kept getting an itch and couldn’t figure out why her left breast was getting the irritation. This should wake all of us parents up to any unusual knots or bumps in our children.

Fifth-grader Hannah Powell-Auslam felt a constant itch in her left breast. She wasn’t sure what was causing the irritation, so she went and asked her mom about it. When Carrie Auslam immediately discovered a hard mass in her daughter’s breast, she took her to the hospital as a precautionary measure.

Hopefully we’ll hear reports that she’s recovered and the cancer is completely gone.

If something doesn’t seem right, it’s not your right to stand up for yourself, it’s your responsibility. Your health is something that you need to take control of and long-gone are the days that “Doctor knows best.”

Doctors are human, they make mistakes. Nurses and other healthcare professionals do too. The problem is, in many professions mistakes don’t affect lives quite as directly as they do if someone in health care does.

Someone I know through the Internet brought this home the other day and the message is frightening. Although to err is human, when a doctor refuses to even consider that he or she may have made an error, treating you as a worry wart, that’s gone into another zone completely.

This writer was diagnosed with breast cancer recently. After the shock of the diagnosis, she went ahead with a double mastectomy. She reported that she felt pretty good afterwards and was looking forward to moving on with what she had to do next. No-one could have imaged what happened next.

She went to her doctor to get her drains from the surgery removed and she felt a familiar lump. Her doctor waved her concerns aside and was almost patronizing when he finally agreed to let her go for an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed a lump. Further investigation followed.

When she had her biopsy for her original cancer diagnosis, the tumor had been tagged so it could be noticeable as *the* tumor and not another one. When they checked for the tag - imagine their shock when they found the tumor that she was to have removed, was still there.

So, not only was the doctor disbelieving of his patients, who should know her body better than anyone, he was willing to brush off her concerns. Thank goodness she pushed. I don’t know if I would have.

She has to have more surgery next week. You can read about her journey in her blog, Pink Is Not My Color.

I know we don’t like to be pains, to seem mistrustful. But when it comes to *your* body, you need to stand up for yourself. Doctors aren’t out to make deliberate mistakes but mistakes do happen. The problem is only compounded once if people feel that they can’t possibly make an error. Take care of yourself. No-one else will when it comes right down to it.

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Image: Morguefile.com