san diego area
Comments
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Sylvia-What time do you want me at your house?
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Hey BMD--since you are gonna be the navigator--will
11:30 at my house get us there by noon? -
Need to celebrate my good news - my tumor markers went down & the doctor said we should probably stop looking at them because all they are doing is how crazed I become when I'm worried!
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Hi gals I am so glad, guitargirl, it is so hard to go to the checkups, glad it is time to stop them. One gal's shot through the roof, and everyone went crazy and they found out she had changed her allergy meds. So they are a bit iffy anyway. So good you are done with them.
I will see all of you dear ones on Sunday.
Oh Lisa, honey, I was just kidding, I will share a number with anyone, you are so good and have kept us together. Kuddos to you for being you!!!!
Hugs, Shirl
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Girls, I am feeling good today. If this continues, I should make it to the lunch on the 27th. I am looking forward to it!
Take care.
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Sylvia-I'll be at your place at 11:30.
See everyone on Sunday.
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Sounds good B--and BTW--does everyone here know about the voting for a PSA on glamour.com for the best 60 second commercial...so cool--Steve and I picked the same one and it is in 1st place---don't look at th results so far if you don't want to be swayed!!!
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I'm not even in the picture so I can be the first to say that, once again, you all gave me a lift that will last me for days and days. I may look pitiful but you don't reflect that and that's a true bunch of 'breast' buddies.
Let's hope I'm healed enough from my upcoming surgery on my noggin' to make it to the Oct. brunch. How's the 24th-25th looking so far?
Lisa#3 we will come and bodily carry you off if you dare to miss the next one!
Lisa
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sorry to be so late in getting the picture on line.but I just got home...we went out to a friend's home for dinner...salmon just caught in Washington State..
Great seeing everyone as usual...we sure are a chatty group aren't we...we missed seeing everyone..and Lisa#3 grrrrrr...just kidding...we did miss you and ( Adnerb...hope you are feeling better soon.)and hope the sisters who haven't made it so far can join in soon...Shirlann even remembered...to come that is...lol
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Nice picture ladies. It was great seeing you all again. There is so much strength among us.
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Very nice pic--thanks Liz---
Anyone walking in Balboa Park on Oct 18th for the American Cancer Society this yr--also I think there is maybe another walk on Nov 1st for BC?
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I can't do the 24th. I am committed to a school festival for the kids. I would like very much to get out of it but I don't think that will happen.
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I had my first fill 60 minutes ago. SO FAR SO GOOD! I don't feel a thing!!
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Adnerb...keeping my fingers crossed it continues to go well...
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This is from a friend who used to work at UCSF. Anyone interested?
REVOLUTIONARY STATEWIDE UC COLLABORATION TARGETS BREAST CANCER The University of California is launching an unprecedented statewide collaboration for breast cancer patients with the goal of revolutionizing the course of their care by designing and testing new approaches to research, technology and health care delivery. Named the ATHENA Breast Health Network, the groundbreaking project will initially involve 150,000 women throughout California who will be screened for breast cancer and followed for decades through the five UC medical centers. ATHENA is a University of California system-wide project supported by a $5.3 million University of California grant and a $4.8 million grant from the Safeway Foundation. The project is expected to generate a rich collection of data and knowledge that will shape breast cancer care in the way the renowned Framingham heart study changed the care of patients with heart disease. “ATHENA is a model of multi-institutional collaboration and demonstrates the enormous potential in shared systems,” said John D. Stobo, MD, UC senior vice president for health sciences and services. “This is a great example of the power of our statewide university network of academic medical centers; this initiative will demonstrate that the total of what can be accomplished by UC functioning as an integrated system can far exceed the sum of contributions by the individual campuses. ATHENA represents an unprecedented opportunity to play a leadership role in driving critical changes in health care. The public nature of the UC institutions make them uniquely positioned to study the appropriateness and effectiveness of treatment. It also allows for the applied use of new scientific evidence, much of which has been developed in the UC medical centers, to truly change the delivery of care.” The medical centers involved in the large-scale demonstration project are UC San Francisco as the host campus, UC Davis, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine. Also participating in the collaboration are the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Northern California Cancer Center, Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative, the National Cancer Institute’s BIG Health Consortium, and the Center for Medical Technology Policy. “We are excited to be supporting this innovative collaboration that, to date, has the clearest potential to produce ground breaking research that will bring us closer to a cure,” said Larree Renda, Safeway Inc. executive vice president, chief strategist and administrative officer and chair of the Safeway Foundation. Breast cancer, the most common cancer in women, is a devastating and costly disease, striking more than 200,000 women annually and killing more than 40,000 women each year, according to the American Cancer Society. In the United States, more than $20 billion is spent annually screening and treating the disease. ATHENA is designed to more efficiently integrate financing, technology, research and clinical care, creating an infrastructure model that could be utilized for many medical conditions. “Our goal is to improve survival and reduce suffering from breast cancer, to accelerate research and compress the time to implement innovations in clinical practice,” said ATHENA principal investigator Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, professor of surgery and radiology, director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center and co-leader of the breast oncology program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. “By working together as a community, the University of California medical centers, their affiliates, primary care and specialty physicians and patient advocates will work to change the options for patients today and create a better future for all women at risk for developing breast cancer,” she added. The goals of the ATHENA initiative are: • To create common systems to integrate clinical research and care across the UC campuses to advance the science of prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer.• To drive innovation across the UC system to deliver and finance more effective and efficient systems for personalized and biologically targeted care, using breast cancer as a prototype.• To create a biospecimen repository that has broad racial and ethnic representation.• To reduce morbidity and mortality by gaining a molecular understanding of breast cancer and factors that fuel breast cancer risk.• To improve understanding of who is at risk for what kind of cancer, and whether the risk of that cancer is significant or minimal.• To generate the evidence for developing more effective and less toxic treatments and to drive innovation in prevention, diagnosis and treatment.• To provide tools to change the way patients and providers interact to prevent and manage the disease. The science fueling personalized medicine is experiencing explosive growth. Molecular tests are now available that can analyze a breast cancer tumor and categorize the risk of breast cancer recurrence with and without treatments, according to Esserman. “Giving doctors sophisticated tools to tailor treatments to the individual tumor will revolutionize care, potentially enabling thousands of women to safely forgo toxic treatments and providing those at high risk of dying from their cancer with more targeted and effective treatments,” said Esserman. “Equally, if not more exciting, is the promise of molecular tools to more accurately predict the risk of getting breast cancer, which may ultimately lead to better ways to prevent the disease.” Women who present for breast cancer screening at the five UC medical centers and their affiliates will be enrolled into the ATHENA Breast Health Network and followed for decades. All women undergoing screening and treatment will be offered the opportunity to collaborate by contributing information about themselves, any risk factors they have, including health status, and other related lifestyle behaviors, such as diet, tobacco and drug use, environmental factors, gynecological history and family risk. This information will be used to help target prevention services now and in the future. Women diagnosed with breast cancer will additionally join a “survivorship cohort” comprised of women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. “We will be able to create a state-wide cohort of women at risk of breast cancer and develop the optimal methods for the early detection of all types of breast cancer,” said Robert Hiatt, MD, PhD, professor and co-chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. He is also director of population sciences and deputy director of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his research focuses on breast cancer and the environment. “The size and diversity of the survivorship cohort and the depth and quality of the information we’ll have will be unprecedented and will enable the development and testing of robust new models of cancer outcomes and prognosis.” The UC system is particularly well-positioned for a project of ATHENA’s magnitude because the medical centers annually screen as many as 80,000 women, and diagnose 2,500 patients with breast cancer. Still, said Esserman, the new project calls for “a re-imaginingand then a re-engineering so that we can continually improve what we do -- to improve our current processes, to streamline communication and access to information among care providers and patients, and to improve the efficiency of services.” The potential rewards are significant, she stressed. “This project will standardize the collection of structured data from both patients and physicians so that it is computable, interoperable, and reusable, and it will integrate molecular profiling at the time of diagnosis, and create an unparalleled biospecimen repository. The result will be a network that enables personalized care informed by science and that fuels the accelerated and continuous improvement in treatment options and outcomes,” said Esserman. “With ATHENA, wisdom will be waging war against breast cancer and the learning system will continue to evolve until we have cured this disease.” While the ATHENA Breast Health Network focuses on breast cancer, the tools and infrastructure developed for this project are readily transferable to other cancers and conditions. ATHENA has the potential to serve as a transformative model to drive innovation, alter the culture of research and clinical practice and ultimately change health care delivery, according to the project team. For further information, visit http://www.AthenaCareNetwork.org. -
Ok everyone---for those of you who know my daughter Gretchen---she is on her way today to be on the Ellen DeGeneres show---as a BC survivor--I'll post again when I know when it will AIR--maybe tomorrow or Friday...she is sure she is going to win something...maybe a PINK Ford Mustang convertible---she wanted me to go with her but is taking her husband instead--I sent Ellen my Army of Women necklace to encourage her to join!!! More later....
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My daughter and her husband both won PINK oreck vacuum cleaners and nike shoes and Gretchen was interviewed for a game but did not make it on stage---she had a BALL and it will air tomorrow at 3 San Diego time---not sure which station--I have to go look it up and set my timer....!!!
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Sylvia - wow can we say we knew Gretchen before she was famous???
Jeanne - from the way it reads you can only be in the Athena thing if you are getting care at a UCSD campus - right?
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Hi Ladies,
My exchange surgery went well. It was scheduled for 9am but was delayed until about 11. So I was at the surgery center for close to 9 or 10 hours by the time I was ready to go home. This time I didn't have a problem with nausea. I have had the same anesthesiologist (by request) for my three related surgeries. This time he found the right combonation so that I didn't get nauseous. I took pain meds yesterday but haven't had to take any today. The bandages are bothering me though when I get up and walk around so I've been sitting on the couch watching TV most of the day.
On the bright side, some of the numbness in my arm has gone away as I thought it might when the tissue expander was taken out. So I guess I can say for the most part all is well.
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Brahna, I did not know you had numbness in your arm. Which part of your arm? The upper part of my left arm is a little numb. This is the same arm where lymph nodes were taken out. I have not even bothered to talk to the doctors about it.
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Brenda,
It's the upper part & underarm of my left arm where the lymph nodes were removed. I spoke to my bs about it - he said it had to do with nerves that were cut. But I kept thinking that some of it was due to the tissue expander. As far as I can tell, quite a bit of the numbness is gone. I expect that when the bandages come off, I'll know how much of the numbness is left.
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Adnerb and bonnid - I have the numbness too and it is from nerves being cut. It's been 2 years since my mastectomy and I am still numb from the center of my chest around to the back of my arm and side. I guess sometimes the nerves regenerate - mine have not....
Great pic - sorry I was such a flake. I really do feel like I am still suffering from chemo brain as my memory is not what is used to be ;-( I miss you all and hope to catch up with all of you this month ;-)
Lisa #3
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FYI: Going for my postop this afternoon. More afterwards.
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The bandages are off. The girls look good. I've got a little bit of discomfort on the right side (the lift) but my ps said that it would feel tight for a while.
Yeah!! Just in time for my birthday tomorrow!!
Brahna
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Brahna....glad to hear the visit went well
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I just got home from Philadelphia late last night..good to be home
but had fun and I did see the new spot for the Liberty Bell
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Hi everyone,
I'm so glad you are all here, posting and supporting.
My mom was just diagnosed last week and has a lot of desicions to make. I've asked her to come on here so you guys can help answer her questions.
Hi mom (if your on here)
She thinks she wants to do a double mastectomy and reconstruction. The cancer is only in one breast. She read somewhere online that reconstuction can take 2-4 more surgeries and I think that is worrying her. I think (and I may be wrong) one of her biggest concerns is being out of work or losing her job because of all this. She is the wage earner and like it or not, she has to factor that into her decision. If she chooses lumpectomy she has to concider how much work will she loose with chemo and/or radiation.
How soon are you gals meeting again?
Lora
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I have been so busy with work I have not had time to post. I am still busy. I just wanted to let you all know that Lisa came through her surgery and is home with Taylor right now. She will be back to her house tomorrow sometime. What a trooper our girl is.
Lora-I hope your mom does come to visit us here and at our lunches. We have not made plans for October yet. You are both welcome to join us when we figure it out. I did have the bilateral with recon even though the bc was only in one breast. Everyone is different.
SoCal-Glad you are home safe and had a good trip.
Brahna-Any soreness from you files. I didn't go that route but I here they can be painful after a fill. I hope your is not. I still have numbness under my arms. I can't feel myself shaving there at all.
Hi everyone else. When is lunch?
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Hi Lora..hope we can welcome your Mom to our group...we are all ages and all types of breast cancer and treatments...I had IDC IIB but I had a positive node so I had to do chemo...I had a lumpectomy and then the chemo...when I was to start radiation they discovered they had missed a lump so I had a single mastectomy...I have a prosthesis...I was diagnosed almost nine years ago now...I did not work..but many in our group did work through treatment..so as I said we are all different...I know the next couple of weeks will be confusing and difficult, but once the treatment plan is in place it helps...remember just one step at a time...
Brenda..I don't know when... The next weekend is bad for me but the next two are OK..
Thanks for letting us know about LisaSDCA...
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Thanks for the welcomes, please let me know as soon as you decide when to meet again.
I have a couple questions....
If someone does bilateral mastectomy, presuming there is no lymph node involvement, isn't that the end of their worries?
Let's say while in surgery, the Dr. tests the lymph nodes and sees cancer has spread to them, and so removes the lymph nodes, does the patient still need chemo?
Thanks everyone,
Lora
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