Okay, that was a dirty trick, y’all. I am not going to show you my boobs, but don’t fret—there is good news below! Come for the boobs in the cover photo, stay for incredible development in breast cancer treatment and the informative public service announcement!
Two years ago, I made a public announcement here at Daily Kos that I had been diagnosed breast cancer. It was detected on my first-ever routine mammogram. I was 44 years old and terrified as I climbed aboard the cancer rocket ship. A painfully short (but long) six weeks later, I underwent a bilateral mastectomy. Ouch! Those were not the best times.
Nevertheless, here I am two years later and I feel great! That's because early detection probably saved my life and I'm sending out this message in the hopes that maybe it'll save yours or someone you love. Especially because an astonishing 1 in 8 women get breast cancer. 250,000 American women per year!
And not to leave you out, fellas—men get breast cancer too. Get those mammograms on the regular, get those colon and prostate checks. The best advocate for you is YOU.
There have been so many amazing advances in cancer treatments (in fact, jump below to read about an extraordinary treatment advancement), but the first and most important step is all up to you—get regular check-ups, do self-exams.
Now that the awkward PSA is out of the way, let’s take a look at this promising news in breast cancer treatment. From The Guardian:
It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.
Judy Perkins, an engineer from Florida, was 49 when she was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas. At the time, she was given three years to live.
Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said Perkins’s response had been “remarkable”: the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that she has now been free of the disease for two years.
That doesn’t mean this will work for everyone, so far Judy Perkins is the only person this type of treatment has successfully worked on, but it does give some hope for future treatments. For now, doctors remain cautiously optimistic:
Simon Vincent, director of research at Breast Cancer Now, added: “This is a remarkable and extremely promising result, but we need to see this effect repeated in other patients before giving hope of a new immunotherapy for incurable metastatic breast cancer.
“Metastatic breast cancer remains incurable, and if we are to finally stop women dying we urgently need to find new ways to target and stop the spread of the disease. We are thrilled by this early finding, but we must remember that this type of immunotherapy remains an experimental approach that has a long way to go before it might be routinely available to patients.”
Finally, as I was going through my cancer journey, so many of you shared your stories and I found them so very encouraging. Cancer really affects every single family, all of us, in one way or another. Please feel free to share your story below. If you are due for a check-up or a mammogram, take a minute to call and get it scheduled. You might be doing yourself the biggest favor of all.