About 30% of people diagnosed with breast cancer at any stage will develop distal metastasis. I am one.
My most recent post was a reblog of “Starting to see the light” from the blog “Living Life to the Fullest from End Stage”. There is a sentence stating that at the top, above the graphic. It was not my post. But the WordPress reblogging layout is confusing. I apologize. The...
Early in July I have an appointment with my oncologist. She is younger than I, but more and more people are these days. Her father is an extremely well-respected doctor in his field, a longtime member of the Israeli medical elite. I don’t think she rode on his coattails throughout...
This week I posted the last of three posts about my diagnosis with breast cancer at the end of 2003. Now it seems appropriate to post about my mastectomy. This post, originally called “Valentine’s Day 2004 or… I left my breast on the Mount of Olives” first ran on February...
I wrote Part 1 – Discovery of this series in December 2012, followed quickly by Part Two – Biopsy. It’s taken me over half a year to write the third part of the series. The biopsy was a traumatic experience for me and the way I write is to bring...
Have you noticed how many television shows and movies have a cancer theme these days? And how many of them deal with breast cancer? And how uplifting and inspirational they are, as a rule? In order to keep the shows so relentlessly positive, of course, they don’t show much metastatic...
“The addition of new chemotherapy drugs has not improved outcomes. Thus, we need to give the active drugs in the best way,” says G. Thomas Budd MD of the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Budd reported a very interesting study comparing two dosing regimens of Taxol (paclitaxel) at ASCO 2013, this year’s...
Pain is much on my mind lately. As recently as last November I wrote a post (Pain) in which I talked about my reluctance to use narcotic pain relief. Recent readers of Telling Knots will know that I have since agreed to take the stuff in spite of my objections....
Last week I published a post about ways of referring to people with cancer at different phases of the disease (Cancer Words), mostly based on an article and a letter in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. (The link will take you to a Medscape Nurses review of the discussion.) You...
I’ve written quite a bit about the power of words. Words are potent, sometimes in magical. Words do not only express our lived experience, they also give it shape, name it, describe it. One aspect of philosophy of language deals with the interaction and mutual influence of words and thought. Fields...
Just as there is more to me than simply being a person living with cancer, this blog is about more than cancer. It’s about my life: my joys, things that concern me. One of the things that is concerning me very much these days is poverty. According to a recent...
