RELATED MEDICAL ISSUES RIGHT NOW! #3: The Advance of Lymphedema “Massage”!

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…

From the first moment I discovered my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it seemed like I was alone in this ugly place. Even ones who had loved ones suffering in this way; even though people TALKED about the disease, it felt for me like they did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I added a section to this blog…

The immediate crisis that was Breast Cancer and Alzheimer’s have passed. There are, however ancillary issues like testing and treatments that may not be directly related to BC or A but intersect with them. Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: https://thelymphielife.com/2021/04/16/compression-pump-review-pumped-about-the-lympha-press-optimal-plus/

My wife has been using one of these for several months now.

While it hasn’t made the compression sleeve, manual massage (rarely now), and the night-time pressure sleeve; it HAS helped and it IS easy to use.

Comparatively.

What is a Compression Pump garment? “…medical devices that stimulate the movement of fluid in the body…three main parts: the console, which supplies pressurized air to the garment; hoses, which transfer the air from the console to each of the garment’s chambers; and the garment itself, which has inflatable air chambers. (The number of chambers in the garment can vary depending on the model of the device, as can the range of pressure offered.) These chambers inflate and deflate in sequence, applying directional massage to move stagnant or trapped fluid upwards toward alternative lymphatic channels.” While the whole shebang takes up half of a side table and is awkward for my wife to put on, it does seem to work…

That same awkwardness also is a deterrent! In the summer, wrapping herself in a bulky “jacket” can be very hot (though with only 3 months of summer (!), it’s not a huge issue in Minnesota.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all, is that this is a never-ending process. Lymphedema will NEVER be healed. It’s a lifelong condition that, until new technologies are developed that include “Star Trek”-like “medical magic”, it’s not going away.

If you don’t know, breast cancer cells escape the original infection site and can spread throughout the body. Typically, the first place they hit when they’re escaping, are the lymph nodes. When the cancerous breast tissue is removed, they typically biopsy the nodes: “Stage II A is based on one of the following: Either there is no tumor in the breast or there is a breast tumor up to 20 millimeters (about the size of a grape), plus cancer has spread to the lymph nodes under the arm.”

Movement and muscle pressure press the lymph nodes, moving the lymph through the body. The lymph vessels essentially run parallel to the blood vessels, but there’s no “lymph heart” to push it. The lymph vessels have no muscles of their own and depend on pressure from the surrounding muscles to circulate the lymph. When the nodes are removed, the collecting sacs are drained and the lymph is moved around the body.

Remove the nodes and the volume of lymph that can be moved – typically out of the arm in cases of breast cancer – drops drastically and lymph that normally circulates starts to pool, swelling the limb. SOMETHING has to move it and that becomes the responsibility of Human hands…or Human technology.

Wrapping the body and arm in an air-sac-filled lymphedema garment, then pressurized in succession pushes the lymph around and reduces edema…

At any rate, it’s high-tech and as effective as a device replacing removed lymph nodes can be; and until the day comes when they can do lymph node transplants or create artificial lymph nodes, or hand someone a pill that stimulates the growth of brand new lymph nodes https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/07/doctor-gave-me-pill-and-i-grew-new.html…this is the best substitute we have.

Image: https://www.nottinghamspirk.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Case%20Study%20Images/Tactile%20Medical/FlexiTouch-Garment-Body-NEW.jpg?width=450&name=FlexiTouch-Garment-Body-NEW.jpg

ENCORE #167! – Observations of A Breast Cancer Husband – AND AN UPDATE Ten-and-a-half Years Later!

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 was the FIRST and appeared on April 9, 2011. Ten years, eight months, and nine days ago…

I wanted to us a blog title that was simple and would pop up on a normal GOOGLE search, but “Breast Cancer Husband” was already taken (http://www.breastcancerhusband.com/ Still around…). So was “Stand By Her” (http://standbyher.org/ Dead link…). I went to those sites, but one has been corrupted by endless spam and the other has been inactive for nearly a year. Another I tried seems full of advertising and another still was a long advertisement for an exercise program developed by a breast cancer husbands’ wife.

So here I am, because I need someone to talk to RIGHT NOW and I want to talk to other husbands, fiancés, and lovers of women with breast cancer.

Our journey is only two weeks old. While my wife Liz knew something was seriously wrong inside of her body, I was clueless. Until two weeks ago, a biopsy at the Breast Care Center at Regions Hospital in Minnesota ( ) confirmed that she had infiltrative ductal carcinoma. It was the most common form of breast cancer. Treatments had been worked out. Research had been done. It is survivable…

A week later, Liz had a bilateral mastectomy.

I’m writing this six days after the surgery.

I’ve searched the internet and I haven’t been able to find an active husband-whose-wife-has-breast-cancer blog that I could chat on. Maybe it’s because their wives have been survivors for years and they can relax, or they can take a step back, or they’re exhausted, or the danger is no longer clear and present.

Not so for me. Based on everything I’ve read so far, this job is only just beginning.

Ah, the name of the blog: I couldn’t call it Breast Cancer Husband, so I went to the thesaurus to look for synonyms and the etymological dictionary for word roots. It all comes down to a “husband” having something to do with farming. Words like cultivate, garden, graze, grow, harvest, landscape, seed, sow, tend and till the soil are all related to “husband”. The word “reap” was in there, too. I finally settled on the most personal title I could find: Guy's Gotta Talk...About...and unfortunately, the blog expanded in subject matter...

At first that didn’t do anything for me, but when I came across “reap”, of course the first thing I thought of was the Grim Reaper. Then my mind went to work, the Reaper’s robe turned pink and I had the image in my head of the Breast Cancer Reaper: cutting down breast cancer, growing hope, harvesting love, creating a new landscape (in more ways that one!), cultivating peace, sowing joy, tending the field, the Garden of Eden, good and healthy eating…

At any rate, this will be a personal blog with medical LINKS – I’m no doctor, though I have been a science teacher for three decades. This blog may wax and wane humorous as well. Humor is how I deal with grief and tragedy (actually, humor is how I deal with just about everything and everyone…)

We’ll see. All I know right now is that my wife has breast cancer, she, my daughter (whose blog links are below), my son & daughter-in-law & grandson and the rest of both of our families and friends, are dealing with this in different ways.

I should be here once a week, probably Saturdays, and my goal will be to provide something that’s short, personal and helpful.

That is all…

But it wasn’t. It never is. Everything changed as we dealt with the disease. I changed and I am not the same man today that I was then. I avoided bitter. I found allies – in my family, my coworkers, and from total strangers.

I would NEVER repeat this again, but once your loved one has been treated and is pronounced cancer-free (and that IS a happy day!!!), BC can and does rear its ugly head again. A man with whom I’d once been in a writer’s group, became one of my most solid anchors as our wives walked through the landscape of this debilitating and hideous disease. His wife is suffering again, now with metastatic breast cancer of the bones (I detail a bit of that here: https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2021/08/guys-gotta-talk-about-breast-cancer.html).

It is a never-ending battle, a never-ending Sword of Damocles poised over the neck of every person with BC and every one of their loved ones. I pray regularly that a true and lasting cure will be found…

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

ALZHEIMER’S RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #15: Math Formula Predicts Your Alzheimer’s FUTURE PRACTICALLY 100% OF THE TIME!?!?!?!?!?!?! And OTHER New Discoveries!

From the first moment I discovered my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it seemed like I was alone in this ugly place. Even ones who had loved ones suffering in this way; even though people TALKED about the disease, it felt for me like they did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I added a section to this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting Alzheimer’s 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: Using math to predict my chances of getting Alzheimer’s? (Why isn’t THIS headline news instead of another probably disappointing “drug” that costs a gazillion dollars and just does the same thing that some different drug did before? (https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2021/07/alzheimers-research-right-now-14-fda.html))

Two separate studies show similar results in VERY different ways.

In the first, scientists used stem cells in people (taken with their permission, these cells come from an individual – basically cells that aren’t heart or brain or skin or nerve cells. They were able to “turn on the cells” so they became new brain cells in a test tube. The people they started with had either been identified with Alzheimer’s or had passed away from Alzheimer’s complications. The new cells aged, and as they did, they produced the two main suspects in AD – amyloid plaques and Tau tangles – plaques and tangles. They behaved exactly as the cells in the study volunteers had.

The result: they found that there is NO SINGLE THING that causes Alzheimer’s in people. It’s a complicated mixture of genetics, environment, exercise, what you eat, and even what kind of medications you take. Only fifty people took part in the study – but it has yielded some startling information and only the future can tell what else we might learn!

The second discovery? “Researchers from Lithuania developed a deep learning-based method that can predict the possible onset of Alzheimer's disease from brain images with an accuracy of over 99 percent.”

OK, let’s unwrap this a little. What’s “deep learning”? “Deep learning is a…technique that teaches computers to do what comes naturally to humans: learn by example…[it’s behind driverless cars, letting them tell the differences between a stop sign, a pedestrian, and a lamppost. It lets you use Siri or HeyGoogle, or whatever system to voice control your phones, tablets, TVs, and hands-free speakers. Deep learning lets your computer “learn” to perform classification tasks directly from images, text, or sound.”

So, a computer with the deep learning program has learned to predict whether or not I’ll get Alzheimer’s – with nearly 100 % accuracy!

The problem? You have to get an fMRI scan for this to work. What the heck’s an fMRI? “Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity…fMRI may detect abnormalities within the brain that cannot be found with other imaging techniques.” It’s the detection of the abnormalities that form the basis of the ALGORITHM (a mathematical formula) that analyzes changes in a person’s brain over time.

Of course, PEOPLE could do this, but it takes lots of time. Computers can do it faster and better. But THAT’S NOT WHERE IT STOPS; working with the computer data, doctors can also look at variables outside of what the computer was programmed to do….

Neither of these techniques – and that’s what they are, sharpened tools of things scientists have been trying to do for yours, combined with cloning techniques and advanced computer techniques – to better understand what goes on inside an AD person’s head. Once they understand what IS happening, they can figure out how to STOP WHAT’S HAPPENING…

And that’s when we get a cure.

Resources: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-09-brain-patient-specific-alzheimer-insights-cognitive.html, https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-09-algorithm-alzheimer-percent-accuracy.html, Deep Learning: https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-is-deep-learning/
Image: https://www.meduniwien.ac.at/web/fileadmin/_processed_/e/1/csm_shutterstock_142671010_4683b6bf13.jpg

ENCORE #166! – Metastatic Breast Cancer: Skin Cancer (aka Melanoma)

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…

“Where’d this come from?”

Well, see, my brother, sister, and sister-in-law were all diagnosed with skin cancer and successfully treated. As well, an old friend and teaching colleague of mine was recently diagnosed and treated for skin cancer. (The worst part there was that he’d posted a picture of the excision on FaceBook and many (if not all) of US teased him about bonking his head, etc. Thoroughly stung when he later announced that it was a cancerous spot removed, I apologized both on his timeline and to him in person. NOT that I “should have known”, even so...)

Lately, I’ve had these dry, red patches on my face and while using lotion makes them fade, I have (duh) been wondering if they were signs of skin cancer. That led – at least in my mind – to wondering if there was any connection between breast cancer and skin cancer.

Not surprisingly, there is: “Since breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed non-cutaneous (non-skin) cancer among women in the United States, it is not surprising that many individuals with breast cancer will develop melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) and vice versa...recent studies exploring how often individual patients develop both cancers suggest that it [is] more than just coincidence: A recent study by Murphy, et al, for example, found that patients with either breast cancer or melanoma were almost four times more likely to develop the other malignancy than probability would lead researchers to expect. Specific causes linking the diseases may be in play, and genetic or environmental factors may also contribute. On the other hand, the association may at least partly result from more rigorous detection – in other words, a detection bias. This occurs when health care providers who carefully monitor cancer patients detect a second cancer that might otherwise have been missed.”

Also: “Sometimes cancer cells can start growing in the skin. This is not the same as having skin cancer, melanoma, or cutaneous T cell lymphoma (a type of lymphoma that affects the skin). The secondary cancer may start to grow on or near an operation scar where the primary cancer was removed. Or sometimes secondary skin cancers can grow in other parts of the body.

A secondary skin cancer looks like a pink or red raised lump (a bit like a boil). Skin nodules can be treated. It is important to tell your doctor if you think you have one, because if it is not treated, it may become ulcerated [has a ‘cauliflower’ look to it; also it can be weeping].”

So it appears that breast cancer CAN spread to the skin – yet it doesn’t seem to be a common occurrence. I had a bit of trouble even finding places where the two kinds of cancers were linked. That doesn’t make it comforting – just one less-likely thing for ME to worry about.

Resources: http://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-information/melanoma/breast-cancer-melanoma-link, http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/grow/where-a-cancer-spreads

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