Thermography for Breast Cancer

This is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. It makes me feel kinda weird though and I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seems celebratory in a way. There's a hype to it that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I'm just in a downer mood but I don't think I ever liked the pink ribbon stuff. Seems too froofy for what I went through and am still going through.

What really set me off was seeing that the local nutrition store is having lecturers come and give talks on hormonal therapy. Remember that I went to a natural doctor and got a thermography and was told by her that I didn't have to worry about my breast? Well, she's going to be one of the speakers. I saw that N.D., H.M.C. (Natural Doctor, Homeopathic Medical Clinician?) 2 years before my tumor was 3/4 the size of my breast.

I told Geoff that I wanted to go to her talk and tell my story. Geoff calmed me down by saying, "would you want her to do that to you while you're giving a talk somewhere to promote your business?" Besides, he told me, if you want to confront her, do it in private and face-to-face.

I know I should talk to her but I would rather not stir up all those feelings again. Stirring up bad feelings is what I've been avoiding all my life. Avoiding negative feelings is my specialty and why I ended up with a stage 3 cancer in the first place. I just didn't want to go there. It wasn't her fault. It was me not listening to myself, not wanting to face what I was fearing.

I think thermography might be good for people with no risk. I don't know. If you read all the natural doctors, it's the test that can detect breast cancer before even the mammogram can. That's one of the reasons why i took the test in the first place - 2 years before I took another one. The first one was done by the N.D. I've been talking about and she told me i had nothing to worry about...I went two years more in denial and then started thinking that maybe because her type of thermo doesn't give the photo, it would be better to get my next one with a doc who does give a photo.

When I got the one with the photo, the results said that maybe there was a cause for concern and maybe I should get a mammogram to really find out what was going on because what it showed was that I had something going on that might turn into cancer... So even then, I wasn't told I may have cancer but only something that looks like it could lead to cancer. So, based on that and as scared as I was to get a mammogram (with all the false positives and radiation), I ended up having to get one anyway. By that time, the docs had never seen a tumor as big as mine. I got the prize for being the most in denial of anyone they'd ever seen... Very embarrassing.

My first mammogram was taken 11 years earlier when they told me I'd have to come back in 6 months to see if the suspicious thing they saw had changed. So I was freaking out for 6 months with a 2 year old baby and then after I got pregnant with my 2nd child, I had to go back & get that 2nd mammogram, PREGNANT. Then when they told me it was nothing to worry about, I was freaked by the false positive and having radiation while pregnant and decided - no more.

So I was turned off to mammograms and didn't do anything other than once in awhile going to a doc to get my breast manually checked. Around the
same time as my first thermography, my doc had told me to get a mammogram, so I went to get a thermogram instead. My doc also told me I might have endometrial cancer and got me to do a biopsy... My head was on that instead of my breasts and the scare of endometrial cancer was another false positive by a doctor.

My head was also telling me that people like Mercola (who sends out natural health info by email) were right and doctors were bad, so I went with thermography...Maybe getting a thermo each year earlier on would have charted changes & have alerted me, but still I needed a
mammogram to confirm it, so why waste all that money when you really need to get a mammogram anyway? I guess you could keep getting thermos until something comes up vaguely suspicious but mine shouldn't even have been vaguely suspicious so that's why I would never recommend them. The 2nd thermography just told me that something was looking like it could lead to something!

I just am so much more leery now about natural medicine...I do both though, natural and traditional - keep my bases covered. But when I read too much of Mercola I get afraid of the traditional medicine. I am still on his list and am getting better at looking at his advice but not taking it as the ultimate truth...traditional practitioners only say that
natural medicine is a waste of money - they don't believe in it. But natural doctors make it out like traditional medicine is dangerous and you should never go down that road. Maybe it is dangerous and toxic, but it is saving lives too and has worked better for me than any natural remedy.

For 10 years, I suffered miserably with just doing all natural stuff & only natural stuff. I think doing both is better, at least it has been better for me and I don't like it when the natural people make you frightened of the traditional stuff. People like me don't get help because of all the fear mongering around traditional stuff.

Then again, maybe most people aren't as gullible as me or as ignorant or as stubborn!

Me and My Mammograms

Sorry this is so long again…and it doesn’t end on a positive note.

When I was 37, I went for my first mammogram. They told me they saw something suspicious and wanted me to return for another one in 6 months. The results from this mammio sent me into a complete tizzy. I was incredibly frightened for 6 months thinking that I had breast cancer. To top it off, I had a 2 year old and was pregnant while receiving the follow-up mammogram. (And you know my fears about radiation.) So I wasn’t too happy with the whole experience when they gave me the results, “Oh, it’s nothing, probably a blocked duct.”

That’s when my mind turned sour toward mammograms. I was also into my natural phase when everything had to be perfectly safe for my children – especially while breast feeding - including trying to rid my migraines naturally and putting everyone through that hell. I read about mammograms where someone said there may be so many more cancers being diagnosed due to the radiation from the mammograms causing the cancer. In addition, I read about how they scare women and put them through too many unnecessary biopsies due to false positives.

I experienced a false positive and wanted no more of that! Now though, I wonder if it wasn’t a false positive back then. I’ve read that breast tumors start growing 12-15 years before killing their host. That would put my tumor starting to develop right about then!

Anyway after Aimee was born I found the supplements that I thought would keep me from ever dying. I mean ever! Plus, that really seemed like an incredibly lucrative opportunity, especially for a stay-at-home mom with no income who didn’t think she could ever go back to doing counseling again. It also seemed like an incredibly lucrative opportunity for everyone else too – I mean, who wouldn’t be able to see that! I did fundraisers for Jason’s preschool and tried like heck to make some money. (You know what type of business this was and I’m sure many of you have gone down that path unsuccessfully too.)

Why am I telling you this? Because those supplements really did help me – for awhile. I had this bad immune system – gee, could you guess that? All I needed to do was look at a child with a runny nose and I’d catch the cold – every 3 or 4 weeks. And this supplement took that problem away. So I tried another of their supplements and discovered that the fibrocystic stuff I’d felt since high school disappeared along with my period pain and grumpiness. So I pretty much stopped worrying about breast cancer or any cancer for that matter…I was never getting cancer with these products!

After about 5 years on these products, my symptoms returned. Now I couldn’t eat any form of sugar – besides some types of fruit - without my nose stuffing up, getting tongue sores, getting a migraine or coming down with a cold. I also had pretty bad insomnia which I’m sure didn’t help my health. I started skipping periods when I was 37 and was definitely in perimenopause by 43. I noticed that if I got my period in the morning and then took my supplement, my period went away. So I decided to stop taking that one supplement that helped my breasts. Immediately my lumps returned so that made me sure they were the fibrocysts because they had gone away when I started taking it.

My mom was diagnosed prior to this time and every time she asked me if I was getting mammograms I think I either lied to her or scoffed at them. I could tell she was worried but what could she do? I told myself that I wouldn’t get cancer because I took these supplements and I nursed my babies for so long and mammograms cause breast cancer and false positives! I also never mentioned anything to Geoff. I think he may have brought up the subject a few times and I would change the subject.

About 3 years ago I’d been off those supplements for a couple years and started getting worried about my breast. It was around the time before Jason’s Bar Mitzvah. I had other things on my mind, including a doctor who wanted a uterine biopsy due to my having a period after not having one for a year. I knew better than that doctor! G-d gave me that period so I could go to the mikvah for the first time in my life. (I wanted to do it before Jason’s bar mitzvah because I’d heard it was good for your children.) Still, I went through the trauma of that biopsy and worried about it all through the bar mitzvah. The results were negative.

After the bar mitzvah I went to a naturopath who offers thermograms – an alternative to mammograms. She told me nothing was wrong with my breasts and I needed to take supplements for other problems going on in my body. I was relieved but wondered about her results. Didn’t I see online that those thermograms come with photos of the hotspots? I never got one of those. She reassured me that her thermograms were better. Over the next year, my nipple inverted…

So I went to a different doctor who offered the kind of thermograms that give you the photo. That thermogram result told me there was the possibility that I could have cancer growing in the future and highly recommended I get a mammogram and an ultrasound. That’s when I got my 3rd mammogram in my life that led to the biopsy that diagnosed me at stage 3.

The morning before going in for the biopsy, I met with friends for tea and reassured them that I just had benign fibrocystic lumps. I told the doctor and the nurse the same thing while I was lying on the table having my breast punctured 5 times. I could sense the darkness & fear in the room and knew that they were incredibly concerned that this woman was in danger. I wished I’d brought Geoff with me to hold my hand…

P.S. I have an article about thermography written by an M.D. who graduated from Duke University who believes that thermograms are better than mammograms due to fewer false positives and earlier detection. The article has a picture of what a thermogram photo looks like. After my story, you may not care to read it, but it could be that I went to the wrong doctors and didn’t go early enough – they cost $200 approx. and aren’t covered by insurance. This doctor is in Walnut Creek. I can email the article to you if you request it. It’s a pdf file and I’d link it here but don’t know how.

P.P.S. I forgot to mention that breast MRIs catch breast cancer very early and I would probably ask for that if you have a suspicious mammogram. Unfortunately, it may not be covered by insurance and is very expensive. A breast MRI caught the nodule in my right breast which wasn't evident in the mammogram and only vaguely evident in the thermogram. It was removed when it got biopsied - which shows you how small it was! Breast MRIs may be the wave of the future.

Risk Factors for Breast Cancer

Just had chemo today and Geoff and I brought my oncologist our worries about chemo being so easy last time and is it really doing what it's supposed to do? The doc showed me my blood counts from the first time I did chemo with him without the 10% reduction and reassured me that I had literally no immune system after that. When he reduced it by 10%, my immune system was still low. He also checked me and told me he notices a difference and said I should check in with the surgeon next week - just to touch base and see if he wants to do surgery before I continue on with the next 3 or 4 rounds of chemo. (That appointment's on Monday morning.) He also reassured us that chemo is supposed to be this way - easy. Geoff joked about how we were expecting chemo to be horrendous and were disappointed when it didn't meet our expectations!

Over the last couple of days I communicated with 2 people who needed to hear my story. It's a story I've been reluctant to go into just because I feel so guilty about not catching this sooner had I gotten a mammogram or thermogram earlier. (I'm still in the "if only's.) But it's something I need to eventually write about here because I know it will help so many people. I hate to say this but if/when I do die from this, G-d forbid, I want this carepages to be a source of healing - something good that came out of this disease.

For today though, I'll just give you the Risk Factors for Breast Cancer and tell you where I fall in those factors. I got this list from the book put out by Johns Hopkins and given to me by my mother-in-law's dear friend, Jo Ann. It's called, "Choices in Breast Cancer Treatment - Medical Specialists and Cancer Survivors Tell You What You Need to Know," edited by Kenneth D. Miller, M.D.

The Risk Factors:
*Age over 30 (I'm 49)
*No children or first child after age 30 (I had my first at age 35)
*Benign breast disease - fibrocystic disease (I've had this since I was in high school and it went away for about 7 years with a supplement I was taking and came back when I stopped the supplement - so that's probably one reason why I ignored it for too long - along with denial and fear.)
*Obesity/high fat diet (I've been overweight, I don't know if I'd be considered obese but maybe. For sure my fav foods are pasta or bread & butter and cheese. Especially since I can't do sugar at all or I catch a cold.)
*Family history of cancer, especially a mother or sister with breast cancer. (My mother had uterine cancer and DCIS which is a form of pre-cancer that was caught early with a mammogram. I've had skin cancer - basal cell. My aunt on mom's mother's side, my grandma's sister, died of colon cancer.)
*Early onset of menses. (I had a normal onset of menses but not menopause. I started skipping periods on the earliest side of "normal" - around age 45/46 which is why I thought stopping that supplement may be a good idea - of course, now, I think I was wrong to stop it, but who knows - according to the rabbi, this was all meant to be and for a good reason that we may not know right away.)

The last and in addition to early onset of menses, the only risk factor that I would probably not be considered to have is lower socioeconomic status.

There's another risk factor that wasn't mentioned in this book, but when I went to see every oncologist, they asked me this: Is your ancestry Askenazi Jew? It is. But I got tested for the BRC gene and don't have it but you don't have to be Jewish to have the gene.

So, not to make this soooooo long you don't want to read it but here are some other risk factors that were not listed in this book but are out there in the new age, psychology and alternative medicine field. These risk factors are not totally researched or validated but I did read a book that did show some studies validating some of it (Imagery In Healing - Shamanism and Modern Medicine by Jeanne Achterberg) - a book that my dear friend Liz loaned me that she got from her friend who died of this disease perhaps due to not following all of the traditional medical model's instructions because she was so into the alternatives). The list I've compiled below has caused me lots of guilt and pain and one of them contributed to the choices I made as far as not getting myself checked:
*unresolved anger
*unsupportive spouse - or believing that the spouse is unsupportive
*negative thoughts
*radiation from mammograms
*being wimpy and not standing up for yourself in life and not taking care of yourself

I'm still emailing the rabbi back and forth and asking more questions. So I will let you eventually read my entire story of what transpired between the time I stopped the supplement and started feeling a lump and the time I finally got diagnosed - at such a late stage when they just rarely see that anymore now that so many women are getting their regular mammograms.

On to another easy week of chemo where if it goes the same as last time, I'll start to feel body pain on Thursday night and then want to be in bed just sleeping and watching TV until Monday and maybe have one day of nausea where I actually need to take something for it. Easy. Hope you all have a great week.