Dorothy Hamill has BC

I came to the board just to see if anyone heard more on Dorothy....I just heard about her bc dx. I would have liked to have heard more about her bc........because I am a breast cancer warrior.......and I always compare how I am doing along this breast cancer journey (I'm human with all of my failings). I also think women who do not have breast cancer on their radar...(like I once did), would be helped in understanding the many different types of breast cancer that we women and some men can get. I hope the media and celebrities (who are willing), will start to speak out more on their breast cancer journey........because in this country so many young girls watch these celebrities and this is the news they will listen to. Just think of all the little girls and boys who watch ice skating and learn about Dorothy having breast cancer. She..like other ice skaters before her.....can have a big impact on educating the younger masses. No different then what Sheryl Crow did for the music crowds...and Lance Armstrong did for the athletic crowd.

I personally don't have a crowd.........except for this wonderful group of sisters here on this board. I love all of you, and I hear your well thought out words of wisdom......and I just respect each and everyone of you women....

Now....have a wonderful day....and don't waste one more minute of it! 

Much Love Always,

Terry 

OK I lied it wasn't my last comment.  I think Member is being unfairly scruitanized.  She is simply stating the truth.  Of course all of us diagnosed with invasive breast cancer wish we were only diagnosed with DCIS.  I have heard my surgeon tell patients they are lucky as they only have DCIS.  Why would any of you with DCIS be offended to be called lucky.  Those unfortunate ladies who were later diagnosed with mets after having been diagnosed with DCIS probably had an invasive component that was missed which rarely does happen.  I think the public should be educated on the difference between a diagnosed of DCIS and invasive breast cancer especially if a celebrity is diagnosed with DCIS.  For example, if Dorothy Hamill is diagnosed with DCIS and receives treatment if they don't explain the difference and she is back to work and fine in a month it sends the message the overcoming breast cancer is no big deal.  Lastly, member is correct in stating that DCIS is the only breast cancer that can be cured.  You are considered cured after treatment for DCIS but not for invasive.     

Not one person here has said that all cancers are identical - just that the emotional and the physical battle we wage is tough on all levels. Believe me when I tell you I'm grateful for my early stage diagnosis, but I still see my onc every three months for blood work and have the same anxiety as any cancer survivor when I get a backache, headache or any ache that seemingly comes out of nowhere. STATISTICALLY, I know I probably won't die from BC, but my mother thought the same thing. Four and a half years after her initial DCIS diagnosis we were picking out a headstone. So, I may not KNOW that BC is what will probably cause my demise, but it still is THERE, like one of those cartoon anvils that always bops the hell out of anyone trying to get the Road Runner. I don't expect anyone who's never had a cancer diagnosis or watched someone they love go through it to "get" that, but I do expect folks here to. That's what got me so riled up.



So, MOTC I DO understand your point/perspective. Just please know that because we "early stagers" get the "just" crap from our doctors, support groups and almost every freaking place else so damned much, some of us are a bit touch sensitive to it. Stage 1 may not be quite as devastating as Stage 4, but it still has to be dealt with, as well as all the emotional and psychological baggage and fallout that comes with it.



Now, as far as Dorothy Hamill - the general public will probably NEVER understand that there even are different types of cancers because they haven't been thorough it - just like the subtleties of Alzheimer's escaped me until my grandmother was diagnosed. I'm sure there are tons of people who say Melissa Etheridge performing on the Grammy's a few years ago and thought "How bad could it be? She's up and about and looks none the worse for wear except her hair." That may well always be the case - and as a result, I could give a flying fig about what Joan and John Q Public think about the whether the faces of the celebrities brave enough to have so public a battle with bc look like they're suffering enough.



Remember, Dorothy Hamill is a seasoned athlete who is probably in better shape than 3/4 of the country. Just because she has the audacity to attempt to return to normalcy by rejoining Ice Capades as soon as she can doesn't mean she had "cancer lite" or that her BC journey will be any easier than anyone else's.



JMHO. And in the immortal words of Forest Gump, "That's all I'm going to say about that!"

I've been thinking about all this. I was remembering in '97 when I got my first diagnosis. I had been through hours of tests and a really bad excisional biopsy with only local anesthetic. 8 hours after my mother and I had first walked in the doors, I was sitting in a chair in a waiting room, shivering from shock from the biopsy, my mom in a chair nearby, and two nurses came silently in and took up positions, one sitting next to me, and then here comes the surgeon, all dead serious, and she pulls up a chair, sits down, and says, with a pause, "There were cancer cells." At once I burst into hysterical tears. By the time she was trying to explain DCIS, nothing was getting through to me.

If she had come in and said, "Okay, we're seeing signs of a precancerous condition called DCIS. It's not invasive, that's why we call it a precancer," I think I would have been much more calm, and I would not have gone roaring home to blare at anyone who would listen, "I have cancer!" It took me weeks to begin to grasp the difference between DCIS and invasive disease. Now I understand that DCIS has to be treated just like invasive cancer because, untreated, 40% of women with DCIS will develop invasive disease and there's no way to know who will be in that group.

Of course even with treated DCIS there are women who turn out not to be cured. I have my own unusual story of a friend who had a mastectomy for DCIS and 7 years later had a hard node in her armpit and the node turned out to be filled with DCIS. Cancer is a crazy disease, and there are few rules to have exceptions to, and the doctors all have to work with best guesses and odds.

For me personally, I actually wish that my surgeon had not made the blanket announcement that there were cancer cells, because I think it set me on a frantic course of hysteria that was entirely unnecessary.

One more thing: Folks with DCIS are only grateful for their dx IN COMPARISON to other stages. The reality is that we, just like everyone else, wish our biopsies came back B9 and we never had to learn about FISH scores, grades and stages. So, no, I'm not happy or grateful or any other jolly sounding adjective that I was dx'd with DCIS. I wish my daggone breasts would have just behaved and not grown anything awry, but that isn't my reality anymore...



And the semantics about whether women with initial early stage bc dx's were "pure" DCIS or not is ridiculous. I hope and pray my pathologist got it right, but supposed he/she didn't and a tiny invasive component was missed? I'm sure every cancer survivor has had that thought pass through the gray matter at least once. I can only go on the information I was given, as I have no medical degree and wouldn't know how to read the slides if I tried. That's what makes this crap so scary - and I think all bc survivors have that in common. So let's stop nit-picking about which one is better to get and do what this topic was meant to do: give and get info about DH - and wish her and anyone else unfortunate enough to have to suit up for battle with this beast - the absolute best.

I asked my first onc what stage I was.  He said he did not like to "stage" breast cancer.  And I can understand why.  Breast cancer is a sneaky cancer.  It's soooo unperdictable.  I never asked my new onc because I really don't care.  It's all scary.  I know how big my lump was and how many nodes, and that I had a second cancer and that I also had CIS.   There ARE no good cancers of any type.

MOTC, I do understand your point.  I also understand everyone else's point.  There's no right or wrong.  Remember, the worse thing that happens to US IS the worse thing.

I think all of us do support each other on this board.  And we must remember that sometimes we do have our little disagreements...remember, we can agree to disagree and that's okay too.

As far as the public learning from celebrities or us....they won't.  Unless one has been so unlucky to have gotten this disease or someone close to us one cannot understand.  I know.  I was one of them.  I was so stupid that I didn't get scared until I heard the words, "oncologist," "pre-op chemo," "surgery."  I don't know what I was expecting.  I suppose I was expecting them to get rid of it and that would be that.  CLUELESS!  Oh, boy did I learn FAST!

Shirley