March 4, 2006: Saturday – What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Breast Cancer"

When Rex and I arrived home from the basketball game late last night, I thought I’d skim through a few pages of the book Glenda gave me to read:

“What Your Doctor May NOT Tell You About Breast Cancer”
How Hormone Balance Can Help Save Your Life
By John R. Lee, MD, David Zava, PhD and Virginia Hopkins, published 2003

What I intended to be ‘for just a few minutes” ended up to be for 3 hours. I went to sleep about 3:30 AM! Whereas my medical doctor had said just yesterday that there was no way to know if I was estrogen-receptive (ER) positive or negative until the lumpectomy, this book gave me enough clues to have a good idea. The reason this is so important is that at least in some of the cases of the pro-active steps I am taking now, some might be helpful and some might be harmful depending on if I am estrogen receptive positive or not. For instance, early studies of soy suggest that it helps if you are ER-negative but may be harmful if you are ER-positive. If you are ER positive and taking lots of soy products, the soy itself encourage the cancer cells to replicate. If you are ER negative, early studies show that soy does just the opposite: kills cancer cells.

It is frustrating to think (I may be all wrong on this!) that conventional medicine simply says: “We’re not going to take enough tissue samples at the biopsy to run an ER test because we don’t think it’s needful – It’s an unnecessary test at this point.” Perhaps they think that it’s only really needful after the biopsy when it’s known that the lump is cancerous and that that particular knowledge is pertinent in determining what type of hormone treatment, such as Tamoxifen, is going to be prescribed for future therapy. It seems like the fact that the cancer might grow larger or spread more during the time between biopsy and surgery doesn’t make a difference to the ‘establishment.’ After all, the procedure of radiation or chemotherapy is eventually going to take care of the extra size or spread.

In this book, I read enough to begin to put some of the puzzle pieces together – the ‘why’ of why I have cancer. It’s not a pretty picture, for one thing. For another, it scares me to death for my sisters’ sakes. I want to read this book a lot more in depth – perhaps Monday.

In the end, when I called it a night, I’d read one passage that gave me hope because it at least gave me something pro-active to do before surgery. Studies have shown that the normone, progesterone, aids in the cell’s natural death or apoptosis. It is known to work topically. Australian doctors give it to their patients 10 – 13 days before surgery for maximum results. I will buy progesterone cream to spread over the affected area twice daily. I have just enough time before surgery to do this!