GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT #46…and final GGTA…Breast Cancer…Not the End of the Blog, Just…

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…

I started this blog in March of 2011 – seven and a half years ago. During that time, this blog grew from just talking about “my feelings” to looking at breast cancer research and breast cancer around the world. I investigated the drugs that my wife had to take, as well as talked about the aftermath of eventual breast reconstruction.

Breast cancer actually spread until it had infiltrated every aspect of our lives – the lifestyle mimicking metastasized cancer, I guess.

But as I expanded into different subjects and my feelings about them, I started to gain some wisdom. I started to realize that encouragement was important; I stopped writing my fictional re-imaging of Isaac Asimov’s novel, FANTASTIC VOYAGE (which wasn’t, in fact written by him, but by someone named “Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby…Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it…” (Wikipedia) He did, the book appeared several months before the movie was released and has been associated with his name ever since.

As my wife would say, “Squirrel!” (Referencing the Disney movie, “Up” and the intelligent dog, Dug…This ALSO qualifies as a “Squirrel!” event…)

At any rate, it’s not that my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment is in any way “over”, it’s just that other things have grabbed my attention now – as in my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2014 (which we didn’t discover until a year later when I gained control of my parent’s medical matters. That’s a story in and of itself but not the subject of this blog.) I started to look at Alzheimer’s the way I’d looked at breast cancer and now my emotional energy is focused there.

NOT that I don’t care about breast cancer any more. I’ll be getting more involved with the “working” side of the school district’s Relay For Life event in May 2019; and we continue to live together with her breast cancer – it’s just become so much a part of our life that it’s not exactly an…event anymore.

The upshot of this is that I won’t be doing this feature except as an occasional bit. It will be going the way of “Feelings, nothing more than feelings…”, the aforementioned FANTASTIC CANCER VOYAGE, “Reconstruction”, “Somewhere Along The Way”, “Translating the Doctors”, and “Breast Cancer Wisdom”.

So, if breast cancer was your concern, by all means continue to follow for the “Breast Cancer NOW!” which I use to highlight current research and the “Encouragement” entries – the two satisfy the science geek in me and the need for encouragement for ANYONE who walks alongside someone who is dealing with a life-threatening condition. But I’m not going to be venting much anymore. At least not about breast cancer…

If you’re interested, the new order of posts, ending with this one, will be:

Encore (I’ll continue to repost the most viewed posts from this blog!)

Breast Cancer Research RIGHT NOW!

Encore

Guy’s Gotta Talk About – Alzheimer’s

Encore

Alzheimer’s Research RIGHT NOW!

Encore

Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…)

Thanks for your time!

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

ENCORE #117! – Face And 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 first appeared in November of 2014.

So I had my face scraped on Monday (aka The Mohs Procedure) this week to destroy the basal cell sarcoma cells growing on my mug.

Afterwards, I walked around my school with two great-big, white gauze patches on my face.

Now, I work with teenagers and they are almost without exception body image conscious in the extreme, and many (if not all of them), exclaimed, “What’s wrong with your face?”

The obvious answer would have been, “Nothing, what’s wrong with yours?”

I restrained myself, replying instead, “I have skin cancer.”

The responses were startling. Ranging everywhere from, “Ewww!” to “My grandma had…” to “Oh! I’m so sorry!” These are adolescents from EVERY walk of life – internationals, recent immigrants, born-and-raised-heres, white, black, Mexican, Ecuadorian, rich and privileged, poor and homeless, and from every socioeconomic status and race you can ask about. They all understood; they all offered various degrees of sympathy (the ones who were grossed out covered their mouths in horror and apologized), and there were others as well, who totally ignored the elephant in the room (or the gauze on the face as the case  may be).

I got the same response when it became general knowledge that my wife had breast cancer.

For whatever reason, this horrendous disease unites people across all sorts of boundaries, imagined or real. This joins people into a cohesive mass that says only one thing, “I know someone with cancer, and I hate cancer.” It unites us in our Humanity through our vulnerability. Breast cancer, skin cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, brain cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer...and every other kind of cancer can strike any person, any where, any when. You can live in a New York penthouse and have 82.2 billion dollars and you can get cancer. You can live in the Congo-Kinshasa and make nothing a year and you can get cancer.

At this time in history, the only thing all Humans share unequivocally...is cancer.

As an aside: My wife and I are walking in the Cooper-Armstrong Relay For Life this spring 2015 and as with last year, we’re hoping people will sponsor us (we’ll be on the Cooper Faculty Team) so that someday – SOMEDAY – I won’t have to say:

“My _______  has skin cancer.”

Or “My ______ has breast cancer”.

Or even the euphemistic, “We’re gonna get rid of the Big C”.

Anyone care to join me?

Resource: https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/the-poorest-countries-in-the-world, http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

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

Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #8: When The Battle Has Been Lost…

The older I get, the more suffering and pain I’ve experienced; and the more of both I stand witness to. From my wife’s (and many, many of our friends and coworkers) battle against breast cancer; to my dad’s (and the parents of many of our friends and coworkers) process as he fades away as this complex disease breaks the connections between more and more memories, I have become not only frustrated with suffering, pain, and having to watch both, I have been witness to the suffering and pain among the students I serve as a school counselor. I have become angry and sometimes paralyzed. This is my attempt to lift myself from the occasional stifling grief that darkens my days…

I can barely comprehend this because I’ve pretty much blocked – or have forgotten – what people did when people I loved and cared for died. (I’m deliberately not using the euphemism here even though that “passed” or “passed away” works well for me. It makes others, like my daughter, angry.)

In recent history, I’ve lost my mother, my father, my brother-in-law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, as well as two former students.

What I remember most clearly however, is those who were with me.

Certainly with me physically, but more importantly much of the time FOR ME, they chose to simply sit with me or stand by me or gently touch a shoulder, elbow, arm. They didn’t need to speak.

The Bible mentions this kind of “with-ness”: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15)

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” Helen Keller

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” Sophocles

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” Kahlil Gibran

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” Lao Tzu

“Compassion is to share the pain without sharing the suffering.” Shinzen Young

“Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.” Henri Frederic Amiel

“For your every tear, know that I'll always be here. To bare one pain we both will share, know I'll never disappear.” Anthony Liccione

“Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.” Spider Robinson

The others are good, but I will take the Bible verse to heart because that is the one thing that helped me bear up; it is the one thing I can DO for others. Be there.

Resources: various

Image: http://www.quoteambition.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/encourage-quotes-destiny.jpg

ENCORE #116! – Implant Pressure…

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 first appeared in January 2015.

My wife wanted  me to find out the answer to this question: “Why do the implants make it feel like I’m in a C-clamp all the time?”

I found out that she’s not alone. In addition to covering other issues with breast reconstruction, the BREASTCANCER.ORG website has this to say: “Some women feel pain or discomfort from the tissue expander, the implant, or scar tissue putting pressure on a nerve or other sensitive area.”; also “A breast reconstructed with an implant may move in unnatural ways as you flex your chest muscle (pectoralis muscle).”

In both cases, the solutions while not “simple”, suggest that exercise and massage may help alleviate the discomfort. Some suggested exercises are: shoulder “shrugs”; should rolls; shoulder raise; arm swings; body turns; lifting your arms above your head (while laying down!); “walking your fingers up the wall”; same as the previous one, but “sideways”; “beach pose”; and finally, the chest stretch.

The Breast Cancer UK site article “Exercises after breast reconstruction surgery using implants” will give you specific details and directions of how to do each one I mentioned as well as a time frame. They start with immediately after the surgery and proceed to weeks and months later.

This doesn’t completely answer however, the concerns of Roseanne Valletti (54) “...she is uncomfortable. All the time. ‘It feels like I’m wrapped up in duct tape,’ [she] said of the persistent tightness in her chest that many women describe after breast reconstruction.”

It appears that this kind of feeling is both common and unavoidable: “...it is major surgery. Even with the best plastic surgeon, breast reconstruction carries the risks of infection, bleeding, anesthesia complications, scarring and persistent pain in the back and shoulder.”

“A syndrome called upper quarter dysfunction — its symptoms include pain, restricted immobility and impaired sensation and strength — has been reported in over half of breast cancer survivors and may be more frequent in those who undergo breast reconstruction, according to a 2012 study in the journal Cancer.” As usual, when you’re talking about pain, there are a million voices all clamoring for your attention. This site written by a chiropractor makes the startling claim that everything from butt pain to deafness can be cured by breaking up something he calls “fascial adhesions” with some sort of bruising method...he does, of course, rail against the medical establishment because they don’t acknowledge his methodology as effective. (http://www.doctorschierling.com/fascia.html)There are claims that shots work (usual hydrocortisone) as well as surgical removal of scar tissue all the way up to and including the removal of the implants altogether.

What works will likely be what you decide works. All of these methods are available and you will find a physician somewhere who will agree to treat you with whatever method you find online or through conversing with doctors.

I myself don’t know WHAT to think.

Resources: http://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/surgery/reconstruction/types/implants/risks, http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/breast-cancer/treatment/surgery/reconstruction/exercises-after-breast-reconstruction-using-simple-implant, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/no-easy-choices-on-breast-reconstruction/?_r=0

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