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.

Dom DeLuise, who had been struggling with cancer for a year, has died. He was 75. He also admitted to have a problem with food. On the Larry King show in 1991 he said, “I finally became powerless over food,” he told King. “You know, anybody who’s an alcoholic or cocaine or something, that’s what food was to me.”

DeLuise made millions laugh in such films as Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, and The Cannonball Run. He was “surrounded by family when he died in a Santa Monica, California, hospital Monday.”

Image: Bauer-Griffin

I knew when I heard the phone ring that my mother was dead. No one calls at 4:30 a.m. I was sleeping in my parents’ house because, though the doctors had thought she had months longer to live, my sister just had a feeling. And so the phone rang and I let it ring and ring until I heard my father’s voice answer from the other room and then I picked up. The woman on the other end said, “Dr. Walker. This is the hospital. I’m am sorry to inform you, but your wife, Mary Walker, has passed away.”  

Elizabeth Edwards' new book will be released May 8

My mind moved with my body in tow through the distance of two rooms, to the open doorway of the bedroom where my mother used to sleep. The bed was empty and I heard my father through the bathroom door. He was retching. It was an awful sound, low and monotone, and I sobbed there, like a baby, on the hallway floor because life was supposed to be different for us.  

(My father tells me now he did not throw up. He was brushing his teeth and sometimes when he brushes his tongue he gags himself and makes that horrible retching sound. I’d rather believe the news of Mom’s death made him sick to his stomach because it’s more endearing that way. But, whatever.)

As idiotic as it sounds, when I read the reports of Elizabeth Edward’s interview on Oprah (scheduled for Thursday), and how she spoke about her husband’s affair, I understood when she said her reaction to her husband’s confession was to cry, scream and vomit. It brought me back to that day, when my mother died and my father threw up, because life had changed forever and ever.

And sometimes you just don’t want it to change. 

John Edwards broke my heart, too. He was supposed to be my president. I had chosen him before 2004, before he played second fiddle to John Kerry. And I was a bigger supporter when he ran again in 2008. I read a story in the New York Times magazine how he would serve as a champion to the underprivileged because, though he is insanely wealthy now, he hails from a humble background. I saw visions of Robert Kennedy in him. He was my candidate; (although my son was determined Obama would win). When Edwards withdrew just before Super Tuesday, so did I, temporarily.

I respected his love for his wife. And she won me over by being solid and loyal. There is no denying he is the more attractive of the two, but he seemed to look beyond that. And when the rumors began to circulate that John was having an affair, I refused to believe them because the John I know is good and honest and loves his wife with a passion – his cancer-survivor wife. The one who hid the lump in her breast as Kerry gave his concession speech to the world.

I don’t blame her for sticking with him, for trying to hold tight to that life she knew before the affair. But life is changed forever for her, like it changed more than a decade ago when her oldest son tragically died, and again in 2004, when she discovered she had breast cancer. Life rarely goes as expected. It sends you to great highs and treacherous lows. How one manages to hold on during those times and keep her sanity says a lot about a person.

I think that must be the value of being Resilient.

Photo, Barnes & Noble

I found something interesting today on AOL Health about diet and health. It seems that some of that healthful eating we do can actually be detrimental to our bladder health. Who knew? Well, after reading this we both will. 

The following evidence is known as “anecdotal” which means it will affect some people, but not others, according to Kelly O’Connor, R.D., L.D.N.

Citrus fruits, tomatoes, while full of healthy vitamin C are also full of acid. This can irritate conditions such as urinary incontinence and over-active bladder. Spicy foods can do the same thing, so watch the jalapenos.

Water is good because it flushes bacteria out of your system. Alkaline foods like pears or bananas are goodbecause the balance an overly acidic system. Broccoli is good and is considered a cancer-fighter. Other members of the cruciferous family including brussel sprouts, cabbage, kale, and cauliflower may help, too. Eat ‘em up. Good stuff.

Yogurt with acidophilus helps to fight toxins in the bladder and look for plain rather than flavored, because sugar is no hero to your bladder. It promotes the growth of bacteris and can lead to urinary tract infections. Artificial sweeteners aren’t a good substitute, because they are like acidic or spicy foods, they can increase the symptoms of overactive bladder.

Cranberry juice. Everyone knows this one, right? But just how does Cranberry promote better urinary tract health?  It’s the hippuric acid, which keeps bacteria off of the walls of the urethra.

Coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes. None of these are good. The coffee and alcohol act as a diuretic, flushing out the good stuff. Smoking cigarettes increases your risk of bladder cancer - it doubles it. If you smoke, please quit.

For more information, please click here to read the entire article.

Image credit: All Posters.com

Farrah Fawcett is back in the hospital, this time because of a complication she received after a treatment in Germany. Fawcett was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and was rumored to have a stem cell treatment in Germany recently. A spokesman said Fawcett chose to fly home right after the procedure (a nine-hour flight) but was “very anxious to come home.” There was a complication involving “bleeding in one of the muscles of her abdomen” which is causing her pain.

The good news for fans of the 70s star is that this latest complication appears to have nothing to do with her cancer diagnosis.

Image credit: splashnewsonline.com.

I have my mother’s hands. They are a woman’s hands, creased and well used. Nearly 10 years to the day my mother passed away, I still remember holding hers, stroking her long fingers, telling her it was OK to die.

There are reminders of her everywhere, pushing out from mounds of pansies in my garden or in passages of a thick Pat Conroy novel. At times I can feel her with an intensity that startles me. Browsing hosta in a garden shop or scraping wallpaper from the bathroom walls, I am doing what she did. I am becoming her.

Nine months after her death, on what would have been her 58th birthday, I held her ashes in the palm of my hand, giving her up to the wind of the sea islands. The dust flew into the sky and down into the quiet waters of the marsh. There was no ceremony, no preacher hugging the family Bible, no sermon echoing in the open breeze. Just my family, what was left of us, bruised and worn raw.

We had scattered her ashes off the edge of my parents’ property on Dataw Island, South Carolina. They had purchased the land the year my mother got sick, with plans to retire early and spend their days tending to the native plants, fishing off the pier, maybe teaching at the local community college. Here, my mother would heal from the surgeries and treatments. Here, she would be healthy.

But the cancer came back. Or maybe it never left her body, lying dormant until we fooled ourselves into thinking that life would be normal again. Cancer does that. It hides in the back of the mind, breathes a chill against your shoulder so you never completely forget.

On a quiet spring morning just before daybreak, the same month ground was to have been broken for their home on Dataw, my mother passed away. The birds still called into the sunrise, the car engine still turned over, people on the street still walked and breathed and made small talk, all unaware that everything had changed. My mother was dead.

I was the only one of my family who remembered that Easter night a year before she died, when we sat at the dinner table and dreamed of their move. The house plans were almost final, there were appliance books and paint decks spread across the table. My mother said once they moved to Dataw, they would never move again. And when she died, she wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered into the water at high tide, just below the twisted oak in their backyard that leaned over the marsh’s edge.

I have often been asked if I miss having a gravesite to visit, a plot of grass on which to drop to my knees and connect with what remains of her six feet below. At the very least, don’t I feel obligated to visit the property where her ashes were scattered, a place that now holds the house of a stranger, someone who never will know the secrets of that sprawling live oak out back?

I stand now, my feet bathed in the gently swaying waters of the Gulf Coast, hundreds of miles and many years from where my mother’s ashes flew. She is with me. She is the water, riding currents across this mighty earth. She is the air I breathe, the wind that tangles my hair. I have felt her during my child’s birth, in the still nights rocking my son to sleep, with my grandmother who since spiraled into the darkness of dementia. I speak to her in the quiet of my car and in the vast space between earth and stars.

There is no comfort in losing a mother, just the raw burn when memories rub against the mind. I choose to visit her here, in the static of my senses – for this is as close to heaven that I know.

(photo, Flickr, debaird)

JWJourney

He Lived! He Lived! I shouted, choking back tears, when I saw a commercial for Diane Sawyer’s interview with Randy Pausch, the man who gave The Last Lecture, that airs tonight, April 9th at 10/9c on ABC.

If you haven’t seen The Last Lecture, a man’s last words to his family, and humanity, after he received a grim diagnosis of terminal cancer, you should watch it right now, here.

Won’t you watch it with me tonight? We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Bring tissues.

Doesn’t it seem that when something is bothering us, we think we’re the only person on the planet experiencing whatever that hurdle is?

Weight gain, career issues, family issues (I KNOW my family is weirder than yours)…kids, husband, house…whatever it may be — we believe we are all alone.

And sometimes it’s not really a hurdle, as much as it is a character trait:

I like to pretend I’m a Broadway dancer, play the soundtrack from A Chorus Line and dance around my office.

I’ve never told anyone that small little tid bit, because like so many of us, I’m afraid of being judged or ridiculed — plus who would I tell?

Truth be told, since I left the traditional work place to start The Pet Set, I have less true friends.

Recently, I experienced a blip my personal health screen, which had me worrying for days.

Keeping everything to myself, I reviewed my entire family’s health history and decided that I probably have 2 years to live.

(I’m exhausted just thinking about my crazy thought process.)

Then one day, I decided to have a chat with a friend of mine, who with sensitivity and wisdom, blurted out:

EVERY WOMAN I KNOW is going through what you are describing:->

This does not discount the need for me to get checked out…but boy I sure don’t feel as hopeless or lame.

Share with your girl friends.