ENCORE #88! – A Vaccine Against Breast Cancer!?!?!?!?!?!?!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry appeared in April of 2015.

NOTE THE UPDATE ON LAST SATURDAY'S POST BELOW!

NOT TODAY OR TOMORROW!!!!!

But maybe someday in the not-too-distant-future!

One of the things that sometimes bugs me about science fiction that’s supposed to be set in the distant future, is when they pull a stunt with the sole intent of making the “futuristic story” relevant to today. I’m reading a novel right now in which soldiers swear with the “f-word”. I can’t help think, “Oh, come on! You don’t REALLY think cuss words are going to stay exactly the same and have the same shock value five hundred or a thousand years in the future, do you?”

Another one, this time relevant to breast cancer, is when the President of the Twelve Colonies on the re-imagined BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is diagnosed with breast cancer. “At her doctor's appointment, Roslin is told that she has breast cancer and a year to live.”

Far be it from me to second-guess a writer and argue for dramatic impact, but this society has TWELVE separate worlds it governs; it has the capability to build (from scratch) TWELVE massive, monstrous, huge star ships capable of traveling at trans-light speeds – but not a single person ever thought to apply technology to breast cancer research?

Thanks be to God we live in this society! While the BC vaccine is by no means “just around the corner”, there is excellent evidence from a few small studies that it may be something that young adults may experience as a matter of course. There’s a glimmer of hope of creating a vaccine against breast cancer!

Something called “Mammaglobin-A (MAM-A) is overexpressed in 40% to 80% of primary breast cancers.” Because it is so common in breast cancers, researchers can use it as a marker – like a blinking light on top of a water tower! – and design T-cells (also known as white blood cells – the kind that fight disease and infection in Humans) that will specifically attack and eat the cancer cells. “This makes MAM-A a great target for a new cancer therapy as it could hopefully be used for the vast majority of patients with early stage and metastatic disease, where the protein is also found to be overexpressed. The vaccine works by priming white blood cells to target and destroy other cells presenting MAM-A, and the vaccination study was the first of this type against this target.”

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg

GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT #42…Causes Again!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Updated 5/26/2018

I have been “funding” for causes ever since I rode in my very first March of Dimes Bike-a-thon in 1972. It was late spring, but the day we started it was snowing. Not blizzarding; not blinding…but snowing.

I finished the twenty-five-mile ride that had taken me around the Minneapolis lakes and out to Anoka. As weary as I was, I realized that I was hooked.

I did a few more of those, a couple of other “-a-thons” and then nothing really for several years.

A dozen years ago, my wife was diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes. I joined several bikes and walks, and one summer, my son and I did the 45-mile bike for diabetes. We did that twice, and one summer I did it alone. The next summer, my son invited me to ride with him on a fund raiser against MS, as a friend of my wife’s passed away because of it.

Then came breast cancer seven years ago. There were no “doable” biking events for me then – I was in no shape to do the Susan G. Komen bike-a-thons at the time, so for a while I did nothing.

Five years ago, my school district sponsored the Relay for Life and we finally “came out of the closet”. We’d avoided it before then, though I’d been asked and we’d discussed it. For whatever deep-seated reason, we didn’t feel ready to join the even. We took the big step four years ago (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2014/05/guys-gotta-talk-about-2the-relay-for.html) and then again two summers ago (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2016/05/relay-for-life-2016-today.html). The group of young people with whom we walked was vital and dedicated. It was delightful!

Today, I will walk again for the Robbinsdale Relay for Life

I have yet another cause as well – Alzheimer’s. My father was diagnosed a few years ago, and now the disease rears its hideous head on a daily basis. He lives in a memory care unit, but the sad fact is that there is absolutely nothing that can be done for him. Though undiagnosed, I think my mother suffered from it as well; though with her other issues, I’m not sure if it was a cause or effect. I only that know she’d been in a major fog for months before she passed in July of 2016. Even as they have an impact on my own life, there were far too many “causes”; far too many medical problems with events to raise money to fight for a cure.

While I’ve recently started to feel a pressure of “can this go on?”, I also realize that while we do in fact, live in the 21^st Century and there are many things we CAN do; there are still so many things we CAN’T do that it can seem overwhelming…

The wife of a pastor of mine once said, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

I pondered this for many years, not really understanding it. Having just celebrated my 61^st birthday, I think I may have a handle on it: I will keep this blog rather than start another. I only have so many candles and I’ve tended this one for the past seven years. While it’s not comfortable, it’s a candle I now know well – and it’s a candle that has truly pierced the darkness. I will keep lighting this one for a long time to come.

THOUGHTS FROM THE RELAY:

It's cold...but the spirit here is warm! The people are warm, caring, and so full of energy and life -- it's weird because the thing that draws them together often leads to death.

The young people, so full of life, contrast so sharply with the images and stories of chemotherapy and the very real threat that cancer poses. Here now, there is the music, dogs, tents, food (lots of food!), laughter, and lots of "stuff". The wind blows wildly, knocking over tents and young people scramble after them.

While in hospital rooms around the world, men, women, children, teens, and young adults exhale their last breath and are gone.

This event not only flies in the face of the hundred cancers that plague even this 21st Century -- where kids speak across miles as if they were chatting with someone next to them -- but it celebrates the FIGHT; the only fight perhaps that deserves celebration.

I'm going now, but it's a night of life that perhaps few of these youngsters miss the significance of. I cannot miss the significance of it...

Image: http://wrex.images.worldnow.com/images/23784252_SA.jpg

BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #61: Breast Cancer Cells Power Themselves Differently Than Regular Cells – and There May Be A Way To TURN THEM OFF!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you.

There are lots of kinds of sugar – lactose is one of them (as in, “Leonard Hofstadter is lactose intolerant.”) Another kind of sugar is sucrose – that’s the kind that clings to Apple Jacks. The third type most people recognize is glucose, most often when paired with another word, as in “blood glucose”.

OK – we got that. Sucrose, when we eat a bowlful of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (Calvin and Hobbes), is broken down in the body into glucose and fructose – another sugar some people are familiar with, also known as “fruit sugar” by enzymes whose purpose is to snap the bonds to make sugars the body can use.

Usually, a cell will take the glucose that is moved around the body through the bloodstream, pull it inside itself and let the super tiny organs (the science word is “organelles”) that are the powerhouse of the cell (aka “mitochondria”) break it down even farther so that the cell can use the energy to grow, divide, and stay healthy.

Cancer cells do that to some extent, but scientists have long known that cancer cells FERMENT sugar for energy. Most of us know what fermenting sugar does: it makes alcohol. The cancer cell takes that product, breaks it down further. One of the proteins – an enzyme, actually – that causes a cancer cell to ferment glucose instead of sending it to the mitochondria is called SRC-3. It's this enzyme that can turn on the genes in a cell and set it on its way to becoming a cancer.

Fermentation doesn’t make as much energy as the mitochondria can, but according to researchers, when the cell ferments glucose instead of metabolizing it in the mitochondria, they discovered than an enzyme (SRC-3) “which is overproduced in most cancer cells…transforms [another molecule that] can turn on genes involved in abnormal growth, invasion, metastasis and resistance to anti-cancer drugs. If cancer cells modify [a different molecule by adding a chemical group, the molecule] becomes hyperactive, a hallmark of many tumors.”

While the discovery and discussion is far from being a treatment, the study group found that if they interfere with either molecule, they can stop the cancer cell cold and prevent breast cancer that has been cured from returning or breaking out and growing somewhere else in the body (metastasizing). So don't ask your doctor for the "sugar treatment" next week -- BUT there are some good signs that this might be a new way to treat metastasis.

I’ll be watching for more news as time goes on!

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403115952.htm

Image: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/candh/images/2/20/CFSB.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20120306033841

ENCORE #87! – Giving Thanks

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry appeared on Thanksgiving Day in 2015.

While the article linked below is about forgiveness, and references Matthew 18 in which a man who was forgiven a HUGE debt went out and when he couldn’t collect on a small debt someone else owed him – he had the man thrown into prison.

I’m sure the end outcome is obvious, but I want to emphasize the lesson implied here. I think it implies that when you are forgiven a debt; when something that you expected to happen doesn’t, you GIVE THANKS.

I forget, now that the initial horror is over seven years past, to give thanks. So at this time, I offer up my heartfelt thanks that my wife is healthy and that I have learned.

Thank you.

That is all...

Resource: http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2015/June/The-Deadly-Consequences-of-Unforgiveness/

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg