Breast Cancer Positive Quotes

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

Sturtevant’s rudimentary genetic map would foreshadow the vast and elaborate efforts to map genes along the human genome in the 1990s. By using linkage to establish the relative positions of genes on chromosomes, Sturtevant would also lay the groundwork for the future cloning of genes tied to complex familial diseases, such as breast cancer, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In about twelve hours, in an undergraduate dorm room in New York, he had poured the foundation for the Human Genome Project.

In many online breast cancer groups, members get upset when you question any authority’s position. When patients invest in that authority, they don’t want to see their investment devalued or diminished by questioning.

Mammograms are in fact fuzzy things. Reading them accurately is a challenging task—much more challenging than even many medical professionals realize. As Timothy J. Jorgensen has noted, when 160 gynecologists were asked to assess the likelihood of a fifty-year-old woman having breast cancer if her mammogram was positive, 60 percent of them thought the chances were 8 or 9 out of 10. “The truth is that the odds the woman actually has cancer are only 1 in 10,” writes Jorgensen. Remarkably, radiologists do little better.

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.

Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12

I discovered this tie several years ago when reporting on an FDA source’s tip about the suspected link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. The FDA official told me that the agency was contemplating requiring a breast cancer warning on antiperspirants based on several studies suggesting a possible link. But some inside the FDA felt that industry opposition would be insurmountable. It was an inside debate that would interest many in the public. As I pursued the story, the cosmetics industry wouldn’t do an interview but referred me to the American Cancer Society, which, they assured me, would defend their interests. Indeed, the American Cancer Society was all too happy to agree to appear on camera debunking any idea of a link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. But in my pre-interview with the Cancer Society’s chief doctor, I discovered he hadn’t read—and apparently didn’t know about—the latest peer-reviewed, published studies suggesting a link. That’s when I thought to ask the Cancer Society if it got funding from the cosmetics industry. The answer was a very defensive “Yes.” But the charity wouldn’t disclose how much and said they wouldn’t go through with the on-camera interview unless I agreed not to ask about the antiperspirant industry funding. I forwarded the studies to the American Cancer Society’s doctor. When he did the on-camera interview with me, he reversed his earlier position that had claimed the antiperspirant–breast cancer link was a “myth.” Instead, he answered my questions by deflecting—repeatedly stating, when asked about the latest antiperspirant studies, that women have more important things to focus on, such as getting regular mammograms.

I’d like to start a worldwide movement to implement practices of culturally appropriate Life Honoring Celebrations. Not to replace funerals but to augment them. Personally, I think it’s impractical at best and pointless at worst to sing somebody’s praises when they’re dead. Perhaps saying lovely things about them at funerals helps us mourn. Saying the same things to them while alive may give us a jumpstart on that mourning. But why not use their dying as an opportunity to grow ourselves, to bring us into closer proximity with the reality of death, to face our fears and step willfully into our deepest hearts to speak the truth of what someone means to us? Why not tell them when they’re alive? Why not let them see some of the difference they made in the world around them? Even the most troubled and maligned person usually has positively impacted somebody. No matter how difficult anyone’s life has been they usually create some ripples of positive change. And I believe that every person longs to know that. We long to see it. To know that our existence does not all come to naught in the end. That efforts large and small have impacts seen and unseen. It serves each of us to have tangible proof of this before we pass. Life Honoring Celebrations should be every human’s birthright. Thank goodness Tracy got to receive hers. Just in time.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Have you ever struggled through a fight but kept pushing on? Kara Tippetts, who is a mother of four had died of breast cancer. She had written The Hardest Peace to show how she was living the best way she could in her situation. She had never expressed any sort emotion that was never any positive feeling. Starting chapter one Tippetts combines both the mind and the heart in her writing. She does not give the reader any way of comparing their life to her story, having to look back on their own. Her book distinguishes many of her hardships that she had before her passing. Abuse, drugs, and broken relationships all lead up to her talk of cancer. Throughout this whole story Tippetts calls her cancer “hard”. She describes her fight with each hard, while demonstrating her feelings of grace. She had never once let her children or husband see her as unhappy. She wanted them to remember her as being this loving wife and mother that cared deeply for them. I feel that this books stands out before all other when speaking of the fight against cancer. Having to always look in the positives shows that you accept what you have. Kara Tippetts has shown that living with happiness, means to enjoy life. When always focusing on the negatives you always feel like you need to please others rather than yourself. Her life, I feel resembles the Catholic Social teaching, “Call to family, community, and participations.” This teaching, I feel resembles her because it shows that marriage and family must be supported and strengthened. Tippetts wanted to show her happiness to her family, wanting to show that she is not in any case, worried. She wanted them to know that she was going to be home soon, meaning with God in Heaven. So what I have taken out of her story is this one thing, “Always keep a positive mind and never show that you are unhappy, for at the end of life there is always a silver lining.

Conversely, the (social and individual) positive effect sizes for homework and scholastic achievement, calcium intake and bone mass, and self-examination and extent of breast cancer are actually smaller than the effect size for the adverse association of aggressive and antisocial behavior with exposure to violent television and film portrayals. Thus, the media effect sizes stand up quite well when compared with those for other effects whether the focus is on undesired or desirable outcomes.

Looking more closely, there are two pathways that link energy and estrogen to higher rates of reproductive cancers among women in developed countries. The first is how many menstrual cycles women experience. The average woman in countries such as the United States, England, and Japan starts menstruating when she is twelve or thirteen years old, and she continues to menstruate until her early fifties. Because she has access to birth control, she gets pregnant only once or twice over her lifetime. Further, after she gives birth, she probably breast-feeds her babies for less than a year. All told, she can expect to experience approximately 350 to 400 menstrual cycles during her life. In contrast, a typical hunter-gatherer woman starts menstruating when she is sixteen, and she spends the majority of her adult life either pregnant or nursing, often struggling to get enough energy to do so. She thus experiences a total of only about 150 menstrual cycles. Since each cycle floods a woman’s body with powerful hormones, it is not surprising that reproductive cancer rates have multiplied in recent generations as birth control and affluence has spread. The other key pathway that links chronic positive energy balances with reproductive cancers among women is through fat. Earlier,

HOW TO OPEN A POMEGRANATE Purchase a firm fruit. Keep it refrigerated until use, for freshness. Cut around the center (the “equator,” if you will), inserting the knife about half an inch all the way around; then twist the fruit apart, separating it into two halves. Hold the half pomegranate in your cupped hand, with the cut side down, and position that hand over a large salad bowl. Using the side of a heavy wooden spoon, bang the pomegranate hard all around the top dome, around the middle, and all around the bottom edge close to your hand. Give every square inch a good hit. You should be able to see the skin softening and bending as you smack it, and feel the small red seeds falling past your hand and into the salad bowl. Now take the softened skin and invert it—turn it inside out—to remove any remaining seeds with your fingers. Repeat for the other side. Eat your pomegranate seeds plain, use them in salads and recipes, or freeze them for later use, when they are out of season. There are some great ideas in the recipes at the end of the book to help you enjoy pomegranates often in your eating plan. Interestingly, pomegranates offer significant active protection against breast cancer.

a noninvasive tumor. Stage 1—before the cancer spreads to the lymph nodes—is curable, though lots of stage 1 patients have mastectomies. Triple positive is good—this means the tumors respond to hormones—though triple-positive patients often go on a drug called tamoxifen, and everyone hates it because it makes you gain weight and zaps your sex drive. In stage 2, the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes; they sometimes feel swollen. Tatum checks under her arms again; she thought she felt some swelling the other night, but tonight, nothing. HER2-positive breast cancer is aggressive—treatment is effective but it nearly always includes chemotherapy. You can order a “cold cap” so your hair won’t fall out, but it’s expensive. What even

Soy Fear of eating soy, especially with hormone-positive breast cancers, stems from the idea that phytoestrogen compounds in soybeans have estrogen-like properties. However, plant-based estrogens are chemically different from human. In fact, research on consumption of soy foods and cancer (though limited), suggests that eating whole soybean products like tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk, or similar may actually have a positive impact on overall mortality and prevention of breast cancer.

My last chemo treatment was right around the corner. The enemy I'd pictured pulling a sneak attack on me was losing. My healthy-cell cancer fighter's were kicking in the swinging doors like an old Western movie and smoking those cancer cells one by one. They were doing the physical work; the least I could do was the mental olympics. The unexpected gift of mental fortitude feels like a secret in the breast cancer sisterhood community. Let’s vow to one another to accept positive energy only, including from our brains to ourselves.

And yet, there can be no bigger teacher, than life itself. Between 1998 and 2003, when the Scorpio was being developed, Pawan’s wife Mamta was diagnosed with breast cancer. At such a time, it would be natural to demand more time, more attention, from her husband. But Mamta was made of tougher stuff. She knew how crucial the Scorpio project was… A chance for Pawan to show the stuff he was made of. “Focus on your work, I can take care of myself,” she said to her husband. Through painful surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, Mamta remained positive. Neither Pawan nor the kids saw her moaning and groaning, in pain or distress. I don’t believe in or use too many buzzwords, and when I make any speech, what I hear as a compliment is that your speech was beautifully simple. “It is not that I was in denial but sharing my pain would make my family miserable… what would be the point? It was my battle, that I had to fight.

a definitive human breast carcinogen.18 In 2014, it clarified its position by stating that, regarding breast cancer, no amount of alcohol is safe.19 But what about drinking “responsibly”? In 2013, scientists published a compilation of more than one hundred studies on breast cancer and light drinking (up to one alcoholic beverage a day). The researchers had found a small but statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk even among women who had at most one drink per day (except, perhaps, for red wine—see box below). They estimated

than those who ate less.135 The quantity of phytoestrogens found in just a single cup of soy milk136 may reduce the risk of breast cancer returning by 25 percent.137 The improvement in survival for those eating more soy foods was found both in women whose tumors were responsive to estrogen (estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer) and those whose tumors were not (estrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer). This also held true for both young women and older women.138 In one study, for example, 90 percent of the breast cancer patients