ENCORE #157! – When There’s Nothing To Talk About Is There Nothing To Talk About?

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. 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 October 2017…

Like the title says…I don’t know what to say right now, so I’m going to direct you to a post by a very old friend of mine. I met Bruce Bethke before my wife and I married. I was looking for a science fiction writers group to join and stumbled across a notecard at UNCLE HUGO’S SCIENCE FICTION BOOKSTORE (http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml).

Bruce, Phillip C. Jennings, and someone I cannot for the life of me remember, started meeting to share writing and talk about the field. Then we all sort of drifted apart. Bruce and I didn’t talk much (it was at the advent of the Internet, so contact we via paper or face-t0-face). At a MinniCon, I heard him speak, re-introduced myself, and as it was now the Age of the Internet, we renewed our friendship. Older and wiser, we found we had more things in common.

In August of 2010, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. In March of 2011, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. We became actual friends (not me and breast cancer, me and Bruce…)

He’s an award-winning science fiction author; he’s a man who has survived some very difficult life experiences, and now he’s the executive editor of an on-line speculative fiction magazine.

Recently, he shared about their most recent experience with breast cancer. I’ll leave you to ruminate with him as he looks at jackalopes and cancer: http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/search?q=breast+cancer

At any rate, you’ll find as I did, that breast cancer and friendships, while undoubtedly a strange pair, can make for curiously strong bonds.

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

Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #15: Words From the Founder of the ONLY Breast Cancer Survivors Group Made Up of Women of Color!

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…

Just for context, I have lived in the infamous city of Brooklyn Center…and not just in the city – about a mile-and-a-half from the Police Station that was front and center of the civil unrest following the murder of Daunte Wright. Demographics as of 2020:

Because of the civil unrest and because of these numbers, I started to wonder about both the incidence and treatment of women and men for both breast cancer and Alzheimer’s in communities with a large percentage of black and brown residents. I’ll get to that in the next several posts, but for today, I’m looking at encouragement in the face of breast cancer.

“Sisters Network® Inc. (SNI), founded in 1994, by visionary Karen Eubanks Jackson, is a leading voice and only national African American breast cancer survivorship organization in the United States. Their purpose is to save lives and provide a broader scope of knowledge that addresses the breast cancer survivorship crisis affecting African American women around the country.”

“As she learned more about the impact of the disease in the African American community, she found a staggering breast cancer mortality rate, limited culturally sensitive materials, and a general lack of support and sisterhood for those diagnosed. She has endeavored to make a difference on a national level, by breaking through the silence and shame of breast cancer that immobilize many African American women and ultimately impede early detection and affect survival rates.”

When asked about successes in the program, Jackson went on to tell a rare, but deeply inspiring story: “A woman approached me who had heard of Sisters Network. She was scared, so I went with her to the doctor, who confirmed that she did have cancer. Although she had her own accounting business, she didn’t have health insurance. The reason this case is unusual, is that I just happened to have an opportunity to go on a radio program to talk about Sisters Network, and I shared this woman’s story. We were attempting to raise money to help her cover the cost of treatment. Shockingly, someone contacted us to pay for her treatment—an anonymous donor.

“This was a wonderful but unusual story. Really, every day we have success stories. We are out there talking to women in our community about breast health, helping the newly diagnosed, and providing support to long-term survivors. We’re providing the education that they need and connecting them to resources.”

“There is hope. Get over the initial shock and fear of the words “breast cancer” and get on with living. I personally know many long-term survivors. I am a 26-year survivor; one of our members is a 15-year triple- negative survivor. There is hope.”

Resources: https://www.sistersnetworkinc.org/mission.html, https://conquer-magazine.com/issues/special-issues/april-2020-breast-cancer/1219-finding-strength-in-the-company-of-her-sisters-an-interview-with-karen-eubanks-jackson-of-sisters-network
Data source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/brooyn-center-mn-population

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

ENCORE #156! – I, Robot Nanites Fight Breast Cancer!!!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. 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 March of 2018.

Most of this article is behind a paywall, but reading the abstract (science term that sort of means the “summary” of what the paper’s about), I can see the application possibilities. I’d LOVE to read it in full, but NATURE makes its money selling the right to read the papers for absurd amounts…

In the online magazine, Science, an online science news magazine, they translate the abstract into reasonably understandable English (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/nanomachines-drill-holes-cancer-cells)

Even so, it’s still pretty heavy stuff, so I’m going to take a stab at it here.

The basic idea is that by using chemicals, light, and even sound, scientists have created clusters of atoms that hang together and perform in particular ways. It sounds wild, but if you think of all the parts it takes to run your car – or even more simply, your bicycle – it’s nothing radically different. It’s just the scale that’s amazing and the tools they use.

By the way, the things they create – they’re called nanomachines. They first four letters are Latin and means “one-millionth”. So, these nanomachines (if you ever say Will Smith’s movie, I, ROBOT, they used “nanites” (another word for nanomachines and WAY easier to say), to destroy the crazy computer VIKI.) can be programmed to do certain things. Sort of like a set of screwdrivers. I can’t use one of those weird square-nosed ones to take out a Phillips screw. I can certainly try, but it strips the head and makes the job of taking it out afterward a zillion times more work.

What nanite scientists do is count on how atoms attach to each other and set them up so that they can attach together in the right way. In other words, that can set up a nanite so that it’s attracted to a breast cancer cell. In the nanoworld, a breast cancer cell will have certain chemicals around it and on its surface. The nanite looks for the “smell” of the cancer cell and then attaches to it.

They’ve also given their nanite a sort of “drill bit” on one end – a tail on one end to get around, a drill bit on the other to dig into a cancer cell. Wrapped inside of the nanite is a little surprise for the cancer cell – a molecule of chemo drug. Once it’s drilled through the wall of the cancer cell, it shoves the chemo in, then shuts down, its weapon delivered.

Zillions of these little machines seek out and destroy cancer cells, so instead of the chemo taking out hair cells along with the cancer cells, ONLY the cancer cells get zapped.

That’s the theory, and now these articles detail how scientists have made it work in the lab. The next step, of course, will be to see if it works in something alive – usually mice – and finally seeing if it will work in the complex universe (remember how small nanites are – 50,000 of them could line of end-to-end and just make it across the width of a Human HAIR! If you lined up 50,000 people, laying down, feet to head, that would stretch 52 miles) that would be a Human body.

So, we shall see!

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

BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #77: Androgens – MALE Sex Hormones May Have A POSITIVE Effect In Estrogen Receptor-driven Metastatic 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...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. Today: A new discovery in breast cancer treatment may use MALE sex hormones!

Androgens, the most recognizable of these hormones is testosterone; might be a possible treatment for breast cancer.

Abnormal estrogen activity is responsible for the majority of breast cancers, so researchers in Australia, after years of on-again, off-again research in using androgens to combat breast cancer, finally began to understand WHAT they were seeing. “…previous studies had produced conflicting evidence on how best to therapeutically target the androgen receptor for treatment of breast cancer, which caused widespread confusion and hampered clinical application.”

Despite numerous failures to use androgens against estrogen-positive breast cancer tumors, researchers found that “androgen receptor activation by natural androgen (or a new androgenic drug) had potent anti-tumour activity in all estrogen receptor positive breast cancers, even those resistant to current standard-of-care treatments. In contrast, androgen receptor inhibitors had no effect.” Because of advances in both breast cancer treatment and a growing understanding of how hormones work in the Human body, this “seminal finding has application beyond the treatment of breast cancer, including breast cancer prevention and treatment of other disorders also driven by estrogen (such as endometriosis and uterine fibroids).”

While promising, this is NOT a ready-to-use treatment at this time. It’s a discovery that will fund research in using androgens in new ways as researchers grow a better and better understanding of how androgens might be used to battle breast cancers in the future.

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210118113115.htm
Image: https://d2jx2rerrg6sh3.cloudfront.net/image-handler/ts/20200331104716/ri/750/picture/2020/3/shutterstock_536117299.jpg